Reading: maps and guidebooks

Moving: walked

19 September 2001: Chenonceau

Wednesday Nisou wasn't up for joining us on our trek to Chenonceau. So we set off for about 20 minutes of highway driving and two hours of slender threads of roads a spider would get airsick on. Highlights of the drive: this was the Loire Valley, and vast fields of sunflowers bounded both sides of the road. A good thing, because they would be the only sun all day. This was the worst weather day, with actual rain. There had been mist the day before, and no day had been completely sunny, but here was the first precipitation.

I should say that it wasn't until this morning that we started talking about Blake, which translates into homesickness. In October we went away for a long weekend and talked about him on Saturday, so we clearly hadn't got ourselves out of the Blake mindset. Wednesday morning, Nisou said something or other about her cat, Cinnamon, who is a nice cat, of course, but still a cat, and I asked whether he sat and watched her brush her teeth and bobbed his head throughout, and she laughed and said no. It had taken 12 days, but I missed my buddy.

Several days before we left, RDC had suggested Chartres, which of course I wanted to see. We hadn't finalized our France plans yet and figured we could fit Chartres in. By Wednesday, we had seen St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame, Sacré Cœur, the LeMans cathedral, and le Mont St Michel, and a château would be a nice change. So we went to Chenonceau, which had lured me from the Eyewitness Guide to the Loire Valley for months.

Chenonceau is spectacular, even in the rain. It is the gem of the Loire valley châteaux, a river house that the crown bought in the early 1500s and recreated into a pleasure palace. In carvings throughout, the initial of King Henri repeatedly is entwined with Cs, to result in in a cypher that looks like an M, for his queen, Catherine de Medici. Conveniently, a backward C run against an H can also look like a D, for his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, whose residence it really was. Until the king died, that is, and Catherine took it over. I'm not as sympathetic to the Wronged Wife as I might be, partly besides that no one ever expected a king not to have other women, mostly because another person she turned out was her widowed daughter-in-law, my beloved Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Mary and her husband, who was king Francis II for about six months after the death of his father Henri, honeymooned here. I had no idea of it until I was in the place and saw the graffiti her soldiers carved into the wall, some coins minted with her portrait, and a few wedding presents, including a wooden chest exquisitely inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl.

An avenue of I think sycamores, quite a long one, leads from the carpark (that'll stop as soon as I get back to the States, writing-wise), to the pleasure gardens, which are more formal than I like but impressive and elegant and immaculately maintained. We hadn't let up the "le whatever" yet so I said "le honk" to geese in the canals. A woman asked me, wordlessly again, merely by holding out her camera with a smile, if I would take her picture with the chateau in the background and again with the gardens. She thanked me in English and in French, and also bowed (she was Japanese).

The château stretches across the river Cher, which joins the Loire at Tours. On this side of the river are a donjon, which must have been even when it was regally occupied only for show, and--see, I've already forgotten--I think a bridge over a diversion of the Cher to the chateau itself. Also on this side were most of the living quarters--bedrooms and salons and libraries and, OMFB, the kitchens. At the edges of the floors, the paint on the tiles hadn't been walked off; between hand- and eye-level on the tapestries, the most wear showed. One bedroom belonged to a widow who apparently spent the rest of her life grieving: every single thing in that room was black and painted with tears and other, less lachrymose devices of mourning.

The kitchens had fireplaces in which you not only could roast an ox, but in which oxen were actually roasted. One entire room was for butchering game and had a cast-iron railing around its perimeter with straight hooks protuding from which animals would have hung for whatever period they were hung before being skinned and quartered. There was a mortar and pestle that must have been the source of those baby jokes before Cuisinart, and topiaries shaped as rabbits, and an entire other kitchen, easily quadruple the size of my mother's but a fraction of the whole complex, that was modernized in the first World War to cook for the wounded, who were hospitalized in the great galleries that span the river.

The woman who owned the place during the French Revolution didn't get exterminated because she had done all these Good Works. Also she wound up being George Sand's grandmother, George Sand who brought the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries to light.

Photographs maybe later. I just want to get this up.

Two things about the rest of Wednesday:

• In the evening, RDC excused himself from the meal to the luggage to check our train times and came back to the dining table to tell us, "Our tickets are for 8:57 a.m. for September nineteenth."
  I shrieked slightly: "Today's the 19th."
  He said, "Yep, it's a Shakespeare train."
  "Fuck off," I said, because I'm so poised and gracious and charming, even though I was glad of the joke, which showed he'd forgiven me. As Nisou and SPG asked how it's a Shakespeare train, I hid my face and RDC explained the mix-up of the week before.
• Stayed up waaaaay too late and not long enough talking with Nisou.