Chenonceau and Tours

The weekend after we returned from the UK, we decided to take an overnight trip to Tours, in the Centre région of France. Tours is situated on the south bank of the Loire River ("the Mississippi River of France"), the longest river in the country (draining more than 20% of France's land area) and the traditional dividing line between northern and southern France, although it's not an even division. It's more of a 1/3 (northern France), 2/3 (southern France) division. Still, the Loire has served as a convenient dividing line since Roman times, when it (roughly) formed the boundary between two of the provinces of Gaul.

Chenonceau.

In more modern times, the Loire valley is famous for its numerous chateaux. While this is usually translated as "castles," they're not castles in the sense that most Americans think of castles: big stone buildings from fairy tales full of knights in shining armor and damsels in distress and jousting. Instead, these castles were large aristocratic estates built between the 15th and 17th centuries as a kind of rural retreat from court life in Paris. Many of the estates ended up being acquired (one way or another) by the French royal family. At any rate, after taking the train from Rennes to Tours Saturday morning, we immediately got on another train to Chenonceaux, a tiny town about 25 minutes from Tours which contains one of these chateaux, called Chenonceau (without an "x" on the end).

Some of the gardens.

The castle was built between 1515 and 1521 by a French noble but it was seized by the French king not long afterwards. Its most famous residents were Diane de Poitiers, King Henry II's mistress, and, when Henry died in 1559, his widow, Catherine de' Medici. Catherine was regent for her three young sons (two of whom also died young) and effectively ruled France for 30 years until her death. After that, the castle was inhabited by various members of the royal family, including Catherine's daughter-in-law (who lived in the castle following the assassination of her husband, King Henry III) and another mistress, that of King Henry IV, in the early 17th century. It was sold to various aristocrats and merchants and it's still actually private property today, although open to the public. In fact, other than Versailles, Chenonceau is the most-visited chateau in France.

Lisa-sized chairs in the guard room.

A Renaissance bedroom.

The train dropped us off almost directly in front of the castle grounds. After buying our tickets, we walked down the long tree-lined path to the chateau itself. It was a pretty grand entrance, although it would have been much more impressive in the summer when everything is in bloom. We walked through part of the garden next to the chateau to get a view of the most striking part about the building: it's actually constructed over the River Cher on a series of huge piers. It's pretty amazing architecturally! We spent a couple hours inside the

The Grand Gallery.

chateau, which has been restored to the way it would have looked in the 16th and 17th centuries when Catherine de Medici and her descendants lived there. There are several fancily decorated bedrooms (most with

Part of the kitchen.

original furniture), Catherine's office and library, a guard room, a chapel (which was saved from destruction during the French Revolution because the owner of the house threw all of her fire wood inside so that when the mob showed up to tear out anything religious, it looked like a huge storeroom!), and some impressive kitchens. We also got to walk in the long grand gallery which is the huge room spanning the river - this is where banquets and dances would have been held. It's paved in slate and limestone and limestone, being softer, was worn away more than the slate, meaning the floor is no longer even! Many of the rooms also had old paintings 16th-century Flemish tapestries in them and each room had a different (and very extravagant) display of fresh flowers; all the flowers are grown on the chateau's gardens.

16th-century tapestries.

An upstairs hallway.

Catherine de Medici's
office (that's not Catherine
behind the desk!).

The hedge maze.

After we finished going through every room inside (except the upper floors of the long gallery), we walked around outside for a bit, seeing another garden, the chateau's vegetable garden (obviously bare), four donkeys that had Greek names for some reason, and a hedge maze (we successfully made it to the center and back out - yay!). We then hustled to catch the last reasonable train back to Tours, making it just in time. After we checked into our hotel in Tour (a nice quiet place in a residential neighborhood not far from the train station), we had dinner at a raclette restaurant. We got a small electric contraption into which you put small slices of cheese to melt them and on top of which they put a bowl of boiled potatoes to keep them warm. We poured the cheese over the potatoes and it also came with cold cuts (although not Lisa's), a small salad, mini pickles, and a good bottle of local Touraine wine. The meal was good, but the hostess was awfully rude to us and almost everyone else who came in to eat!

Fritz the Elephant.

The next morning we started with a good breakfast in the hotel dining room. It was all organic and mostly locally grown or made. We then headed to the tourist office and, after learning that the city's art museum was free because it was the first Sunday of the month, we decided to head there. It's located in what used to be the archbishop's palace, so it's a nice architectural space. There's also a huge cedar of Lebanon in the courtyard, which was pretty cool, as well as a stuffed elephant, Fritz, who escaped from the Barnum and Bailey circus in Tours in 1902, went on a rampage, and had to be shot and killed. The art collection itself was good, but not spectacular, but, hey, who can complain when it's free? When the museum closed for lunch at 12:45, we walked next door to the Cathedral of Saint Gatien. It hard started to rain at this point, so we were happy to get inside again! The exterior of the cathedral is decorated in the late 15th century "flamboyent" Gothic style with lots of intricate carvings. The interior was more sedate, but it didn't seem that different from many other Gothic cathedrals we've been in.

St. Gatien, exterior.

St. Gatien, interior.

The Loire, "the Mississippi of France."

We then walked up to the River Loire and along its embankment for a bit. It's very wide, seemed pretty shallow, but had a very fast current. After that, we walked back to the cathedral to visit the Psaltry cloisters, which were now open. The cloisters used to be part of the medieval choir school that was attached to the cathedral, then during the Renaissance, they were turned into a scriptorium for

The scriptorium of the Psaltery cloisters.

copying books. The cloisters were very small, but pleasant and they had a second story, which is something we haven't seen in other cloisters so far. There were also some reproductions of the manuscripts that were made there (the originals are in the city library). Entrance here was free, too, since it was the first Sunday of the month - another bonus visit
for us! After the cloisters, we returned to the art museum to finish our visit since it had reopened after the lunch hour (and was now MUCH more crowded, probably because people had come after church!).

Waterspout in the Psaltery cloisters.

When we finished, we walked west through the rain across town to the Basilica of Saint Martin of Tours (a fifth-century bishop who was much-revered in the Middle Ages). The original basilica was destroyed in the religious wars of the 17th century (two of the massive towers are still standing outside the modern basilica) and what's there now was
completed in 1902. It was very different from any other church we've
seen in France: it had a dome, for one thing, and lots of marble columns inside. It looked much more like one of the churches we saw in Rome. We went down the crypt to see the tomb of Saint Martin, but there were people there praying, so we

Basilica of St. Martin of Tours.

couldn't really move around the space too much. It's clearly still a place of pilgrimage because on the way out, we noticed a small metal roundel in the sidewalk with the shell of St. James of Compostela, just like we saw in Chartres.

We then walked into the old town, had a late afternoon snack at an Irish pub, walked back through the center of town on the Rue Nationale, past the very cool art deco city hall, to the train station to catch our train home. Tours was nice, but it really seemed a lot like Rennes, and therefore not terribly spectacular because it didn't seem very new to us, apart, of course, from the chateau at Chenonceau!