Bellegarde

The château de Bellegarde is one of my favorite stopping-off points on the drive to Paris as we do it. We don't usually take the autoroute (the toll is $20 each way) even though that would be the fastest route. And the most boring.

The château de Bellegarde, between Orléans and Fontainebleau

Instead, we drive through the forests of the Sologne up to Orléans, and then we head northeast toward Fontainebleau, passing through Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, Bellegarde, Puiseaux, Malesherbes, and Milly-la-Forêt. The countryside is pretty, and there's no traffic until we hit the freeway that leads into Paris, which we are on for the last 30 minutes of the three-hour trip.

Close-up of the towers and rooftops

Bellegarde was a surprise the first time we did the drive, two or three years ago. We didn't know it existed. And it turned out to be the perfect stop for the dog. She could take a walk around the grounds and a couple of pipis before we headed on into the city.

Brick tower added on in the 18th century

The château de Bellegarde was built in the late 1300s, so it's 700 years old. It was originally what is called a donjon in French — a fortified tower, or keep. But in the 1600s, it became the property of the duc d'Antin, who was the son of one of Louis XIV's mistresses, Mme de Montespan.

The château on the right with 18th-century additions in the background

Façade of one of the duc d'Antin's additions

Like nearly all châteaux, Bellegarde changed and evolved over the centuries, as needs changed and building techniques and styles advanced.

Detail of the side tower, built in brick in the 1700s

In the early 1700s, the duke had the place remodeled significantly, turning it into a residence by adding on new wings and outbuildings, the grand staircases on the front, and formal gardens. One of the "new" buildings is now the Bellegarde town hall.

The moat at Bellegarde is actually a small lake

The château de Bellegarde is right on the main road that crosses the town. It's an easy stop, and it's nice to stroll around the moat, across the little bridge, and up to the château itself. There's a nice rose garden.

The bridge

I took these pictures after lunch in Combreux on July 15, 2006, when I visited Bellegarde with Marthe, Pierre, and CHM. It was a hot, clear Saturday afternoon and, again, we had the place all to ourselves.

Brickwork along the edge of the moat

I'm falling behind... here's Bellegarde

The château de Bellegarde reflected in its moat

I can't keep up with our travels and activities on this blog. The blog is still on Sunday and in Fontainebleau and Bellegarde. Today is Thursday already and our tours of Loire Valley sights are nearly finished now. I thas been much too short.

An old road sign on the Nationale 60 road in Bellegarde
says that Orléans is 47.5 km in one direction
and Montargis is 23 km in the other.

I'll be able to report more on this week's activities next week. Joanna and Janice fly back to North Carolina on Saturday, and we'll be on the road until then, without Internet access, starting tomorrow morning.

One of the staircases at the château de Bellegarde

Bellegarde is a place I've photographed and written about several times (here and here) since I started this blog. It's a convenient stopping point for us, it being about half way between Saint-Aignan and Paris if you take the route that goes through Orléans and Milly-la-Forêt, near Fontainebleau. The château de Bellegarde and its setting are beautiful.

Vanishing France

Bellegarde itself is a little down-at-the-heels. It's a village in transition. It has been bypassed by the main highway. The old road is a narrow street that passes through the middle of the village, and the houses and abandoned storefronts along that street are covered in black soot from automobile and truck exhaust. I posted this picture a couple of days ago.

The old bridge at the château de Bellegarde

More next week about Saint-Aignan, Valençay, Loches, Chenonceaux, Amboise, Chaumont, Blois, Chambord, and other places along the way. Today we are leaving to go to the Mont Saint-Michel, which my sister really wants to see, and on to Paris for 24 hours. On Saturday, Joanna and Janice fly back to the U.S. and I drive back to Saint-Aignan. There are many gardening chores to do now.

Le Château de Bellegarde

From Sully-sur-Loire, it's about a 30 minute drive north to the town of Bellegarde and its château, which was built starting in the 14th century and re-built in the 15th. Bellegarde is a place I liked to drive through and it was a good rest stop when we used to drive to Paris, as I wrote back then, at the drop of a hat. Bellegarde is about two hours northeast of Saint-Aignan and Paris is about two hours north of Bellegarde.

The moat around the château at Bellegard is a small lake.

Like Sully, Bellegarde offers nice moat relections...

Bellegarde, dans le Loiret

Le château de Bellegarde is 25 miles northeast of Orléans on the route I used to take when I was still driving to Paris. I don't drive to Paris any more, because I don't trust myself to drive in Paris traffic. It's easier to take the train, and less expensive when you consider the cost of fuel for the car and the cost of parking in the city. Bellegarde, the town, is about two hours northeast of Saint-Aignan and about two hours south the center of Paris (depending on traffic).

The brick-and-stone château de Bellegarde was built starting in the 14th century, and I've read that it stands on even earlier foundations. It was modified and enlarged over the centuries, until about the time of the French Revolution.

It was always nice to get out of the car and take a walk around Bellegarde on those driving days. I haven't found any information about who owns the château, but on one site I just read that it's open to the public sur rendez-vous. Call ahead. I've never been inside. I've just walked around the château outside, to take pictures and stretch my legs.

I've posted a lot of photos of Bellegarde over the years.

Bellegarde, half way to Paris

When we used to go to Paris frequently, back between 2003 and 2008, we tried all sorts of different routes to get there from Saint-Aignan. We were looking for picturesque roads where it wasn't to easy to get lost and where we wouldn't have to pay the high tolls they charge on the French autoroutes.

The road we finally settled on took us through the Sologne (woods and tiny villages) around the south side of Orléans (a fairly big city) and to the northeast toward Fontainebleau, where we could jump on the toll-free autoroute into Paris at the Porte d'Orléans and drive easily to our old stomping grounds in the Latin Quarter. Along the way, we discovered the château de Bellegarde, at the halfway point in the four-hour trip.

I stopped at Bellegarde again last Saturday morning on the way to Paris to see CHM. It had been a while. It's one of my favorite places because there's never anybody else there. The château itself is empty, as far as I know, and you can't go inside. There's something about the brick building that reminds me of the Sologne region near us, and of brick buildings back in North Carolina and Virginia. Of course, Bellegarde is much grander than such places.

Here are posts about Bellegarde that I wrote in 2006 and 2007, when we used to stop there regularly. I'll always feel an attachment to the place because we stumbled upon it by accident and it reminds me of our first years in France. The village it's in is one of those lost-in-time places that reminds me of our first years in France. This time, two boys were fishing in the moat around the château. I saw them haul in one little fish as I watched them and took photos.

Le Château de Bellegarde, à Bellegarde (Loiret)

When we first came to live here in 2003, we used to get in the car and drive to Paris at the drop of a hat. To go to an Asian supermarket, for example, or to go see a movie or a concert. We never took the autoroute because we didn't want to pay the tolls. We had no real income, only savings. So we drove the back roads. One place we discovered on those little roads was the Château de Bellegarde, which is in the town of Bellegarde, about two hours from Saint-Aignan and 40 minutes east of Orléans. It made a good rest stop for us. There's been a château here since the 14th century.

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Bellegarde in pictures

One of king Louis XIV's famous mistresses, known as Madame de Montespan, spent a lot of time at Bellegarde over the course of the 17th century. Her full name was Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart and she was a "favorite" of the king. She had seven children by him. Another of her children, a son named Louis-Antoine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, served as an officer in the Sun King's army for a while, but he was eventually disgraced for making a strategic mistake in a battle and was removed from service. He owned the Château de Bellegarde, but I'm not sure how he acquired it. During his years as the lord of Bellegarde, he had a lot of out-buildings built around the château, turning it into a big complex. Thanks to the Michelin Green Guide for that information.

Driving and parking adventures

Last week we drove our friend Sue to Paris so that she could catch her plane back to California. Her three-month stay was over. We left Saint-Aignan on Tuesday at noontime and took a nice drive up through the pine and birch forests of the Sologne region on our way to the city of Orléans. I just posted a picture of the Orléans "skyline" on my Loire Valley Images photoblog.

We drove into the center of the city and stopped at about 2:00 for a coffee at an outdoor café on the main square. The weather was turning warm. We were surprised how busy, prosperous-looking, and attractive Orléans was, and we plan to go back there soon for a better look around.

Le château de Bellegarde, with its grand staircases

From Orléans we drove on northeast toward one of my favorite stopping-off points on the road to Paris, the town of Bellegarde. It has a beautiful château and makes a nice place to get out of the car, stretch your legs, and take a few photos on the way to the big city. Our dearly departed dog Collette used to enjoy the stop there when we would travel with her in the car. Of course, she would have enjoyed stopping anywhere, especially if she could sniff around for a few minutes and leave her mark on the place.

The view under the château stairways at Bellegarde

From Bellegarde we drove on up through Malesherbes and Milly-la-Forêt to get to the autoroute near Fontainebleau and zip on into Paris. Ha ha. "Zipping" is rarely possible on the way into Paris, because traffic is almost always heavy. Tuesday evening was no exception.

We went around Paris on the boulevard périphérique, the ring road, and continued north to Charles de Gaulle airport, where Sue had booked a hotel for the night. Her plane was leaving fairly early the next day. We got to the airport at about 5:45 p.m. It had turned into a long drive — about 5½ hours.

Once we got to the airport, we had no trouble finding the Ibis hotel Sue was staying in. We had printed out directions that were posted on the hotel's web site. But when we drove into the parking lot, around behind a Campanile restaurant, there were several busloads of policemen (des CRS, if that means anything to you) there, and a lot of them were standing around in the lot.

We wondered what was going on. Had there been a terrorist threat? They were blocking our path, and we asked if we could pass. They seemed surprised that we asked, and they got out of the way with a smile and a nod. Thirty minutes later, when we were leaving, they were gone.

We had taken a ticket to get into the hotel parking area, and we ended up parking in an underground garage. To get to the elevator, we had to buzz the hotel reception desk on a little intercom and wait to be let in. We heard a click and the door opened. Up in the lobby, there was a crowd of people, including a lot of Americans, but it wasn't long before Sue was checked in. The hotel employees spoke English.

Then we realized we had to pay for parking at a machine in the lobby before we could get the car out of the garage. The problem was that we had left the parking ticket in the car. And you couldn't get the elevator to take you back down into the garage unless you were a hotel guest and had a room key (a card actually, and it had to be inserted into a reader in the elevator before the elevator doors would close). So Sue had to accompany Walt to the car.

My job was to find a telephone on which I could call our friend in Paris who was putting us up for the night, and tell him we were running late. Traffic going back into the city, we had noticed, was very heavy, so we didn't know what time we would get to his place. There was no phone in the Ibis lobby that accepted phone cards, and I had no change. So I had to go out and walk over to a different hotel before I could find a usable phone. It all worked out, and our friend said he would just wait for us and then we would go to dinner.

When I got back to the Ibis lobby, Walt was trying to pay for parking. It cost just 60 cents (eurocents, of course) for the first hour. But the machine wouldn't give change, and Walt had only a one-euro coin, which was returned when he tried to pay. I said he should try paying with his French ATM card, which often works at parking garage pay stations. He inserted the bank card, he saw an error message on a little screen, and the card failed to reappear. Now what? No change, no bank card, no way to get the car out. This was turning into a hassle.

Walt pressed the emergency button on the machine, and a few minutes later a young guy came over from the hotel office, behind the front desk, to help. He had a key to the machine and got the ATM card out. We explained the problem — we couldn't pay with our one-euro coin, and we couldn't pay with the ATM card.

The hotel employee had to go get his supervisor at that point. The supervisor was nice enough about the whole thing but she was obviously stressed out. Well of course you can't pay with your card because it's an American card and it doesn't have a chip on it the way French cards do, she said. But it's not an American card, Walt said, it's a French card. Let me see it, the woman said. Oh. She was surprised to see that it really was a French card. Is it a fake? she said, laughing. She couldn't believe Walt had a French bank card. They deal with a lot of American tourists at this hotel, obviously.

We were starting to think we might have to abandon the car in the Ibis parking garage. There seemed to be no way to get it out, and we joked about that. What was Sartre's play? No Exit, in English; Huis Clos, in French. The situation was definitely feeling a little absurd.

The hotel supervisor suddenly realized that change was the answer. No, not a change in the parking machine technology, just some euro cents. She left with our one-euro coin, disappeared behind the front desk into the office, and before too long she came back with some smaller coins. Voilà! It worked. We were free to go, and so was the car.

Except that there was no way we could ride the elevator back down into the depths of the parking garage because we were not hotel guests and didn't have a key-card.

So again Sue had to accompany us to the car, or at least to the door two or three floors below the lobby that opened into the garage. At that point, rather than let that door close and then have to buzz the front desk to be let back in — who knew if that would work? — we just said au revoir there while Sue held the door open. It was an unceremonious way to cap off her three-month visit to France.

The front steps at Bellegarde

The château de Bellegarde was significantly modified in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. The brick tower on the left (west) side of the main building (the 14th century donjon) was built at the end of the 16th. The windows in the donjon were added in the early 18th. The stairs in my photos below date back to 1782. Here's a link to the Bellegarde municipal web page about the town's old buildings..

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