The tourist bit

So what are we doing with our days? Most days we do one tourist activity. So far we've visited the cathedral at Meaux, the gardens of Fontainebleu, the manor of Clos Luce where da Vinci spent his last years, and five nearby Loire chateaux, inside and out: Chenonceaux, Blois, Amboise, Chambord, and Loches. We've experienced one Son et Lumiere at Blois, which is my favourite of the chateaux.

Blois is really three chateaux in one, plus the Hall of the Etats-General, which is the oldest building, and the only remaining part of an earlier fortress. Despite its grand title, this medieval building is a standard French oblong with high roof, its vaulted timber roof held up by a line of central pillars, all brightly painted in red and blue. At the end of the fifteenth century, Louis XII built an L-shaped wing starting at this old hall and finishing in a chapel. Francois I (the French king who met Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold), added a Renaissance wing extending from the Hall to form a third side of the square. So far, so good, three contrasting but reasonably complementary buildings.

A century later we have Gaston d'Orleans, a seventeenth century vandal and visionary. He was king Louis XIII's brother. Royal brothers can be at worst a serious threat, at best a royal pain in the posterior, and Gaston was apparently a plotter. Louis gave him Blois to keep him otherwise occupied, and Gaston hired Mansart, architect of Versailles, to build him something similar. His plans involved tearing down all the existing buildings, but fortunately for posterity, he did it progressively, ripping off the end of Francois' wing and demolishing the nave of Louis' chapel to make room for the first U-shaped part of his grand building in classical style. After this had been built it appears that the king thought he was no longer a threat and cut off his funding, so that was as far as he got. It is a splendid building, but its juxtaposition against the cut off end of the Francois wing looks like something from a Peter Corrigan set.

The completed square makes for a son et lumiere which we found fascinating, despite the fact that all the son was in French, much of it beyond our powers of translation. You stand in the middle of the courtyard, and the lumiere is projected from all sides using each building first successively and then later in pairs and in total as a backdrop to the various stories. And there are plenty, a good collection of kings and queens, including the very powerful Catherine de' Medicis who was wife to one king, mother to three more, and mother-in law to a fifth. There is also a famous assassination, which was quite chillingly portrayed. Despite being a Saturday there were only a handful of people as it was cold. We wore our thermal undies and enjoyed being able to see everything without having to peer over lots of other heads.

Generally none of the tourist sites we've visited have been crowded, and most of the tourists are French, with some Americans, English, and the occasional fellow-Australians. The French clearly use the often extensive grounds of the chateaux as public parks, walking and cycling through them, having picnics. We have also observed that at nearly every chateau we have seen a school group, some primary, some secondary, learning their country's history in the places where main events took place. We wished we had been taught history in this manner when we were at school.