FLOATING CASTLES
Fairyland comes alive on the Loire River
ONCE upon a time, M Hurault was having a little difficulty with his wife. A courtier to Henri IV, Hurault spotted the king one morning making the sign of a cuckold’s horns behind his back to amuse the others present. In a huff, he leapt on his horse and galloped home, where he found his wife in bed with her lover. The lover leapt from a window, breaking his leg. Hurault tracked the injured man through the garden and killed him.
Back in the house, he stalked upstairs to offer his wife the choice of a bullet or poison. She chose poison, and within an hour was dead. Eventually Hurault even murdered the house, levelling the old place. Perhaps a little counselling and a trial separation might have been a better route to go. But that is how Château de Cheverny was born. Hurault’s second wife, Margueritte, was a woman of enormous talent, and in the 1630s she oversaw the construction of a glorious new home. It is one of the Loire’s most graceful châteaux. For fans of Tintin, it may also be familiar. My daughter Sophia spotted that it was the model for Captain Haddock’s home, Marlinspike Hall.
I was fortunate to be in the Loire with a castle expert. Sophia is 8 and she knows her way around drawbridges, locked towers, grim dungeons, royal balls, fairy godmothers, wicked stepmothers, lost slippers and handsome princes. When we set off to explore, she was thrilled. Castles are full of stories, she informed me. And some of them are true.
The Loire cuts a swathe through central France from Sancerre to Orléans to Tours — and châteaux seem to lurk around every bend.
The word almost doesn’t do them justice; the châteaux of the Loire are castles in anyone’s language. They range from medieval fortresses casting their reflections in moats to Renaissance palaces in rolling parkland. But Sophia was right. It was their stories that fascinated, a soap opera of characters and scarcely credible plot lines. We came for castles; we found people.
At Chinon we found Henry Plantagenet alone on his deathbed. An austere fortress astride its ridge, Chinon was once a world of rattling chains and creaking doors, of fur wraps and roaring fires, of the wail of prisoners and the stench of stables and dumped sewage. We climbed spiral staircases, we gazed into dark dungeons, we grimaced in the torture room, we patrolled stone halls with fireplaces the size of train carriages. Not very cosy, Papa, was the judgment of Sophia, who liked her castles a little more luxurious.
If you feel your family Christmases are occasionally a little strained, spare a thought for the Plantagenets who gathered under the mistletoe at Chinon in 1172. Having recently dispatched the troublesome Thomas à Becket, in Canterbury, Henry now faced his quarrelsome family, and they weren’t just annoyed about the overcooked sprouts. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and three of his sons — Richard the Lionheart, Godfrey and Henry — were plotting to throw their lot in with Louis VII, Henry’s rival, who also happened to be Eleanor’s first husband. Voices were raised, doors were slammed, everyone drank too much.
The family row raged for 17 years, when Henry was finally forced to accept Richard’s claim to his throne and — here is the hidden dagger — to agree to Richard’s marriage to Alys, Henry’s mistress. He retreated here to Chinon, where he died alone as his servants began pillaging his suitcases. In Chinon’s rooms, screens show scenes of its history so that the dysfunctional Plantagenets still flicker through the halls like ghosts.
Over at the walled citadel of Loches , we ran into Joan of Arc, the diminutive 17-year-old of piercing gaze and messianic manner, who put some backbone into Charles VII in his war with the English. But it is another woman who dominates here, who put more than backbone into Charles VII — his mistress, the beautiful Agnès Sorel. They made a striking couple. Charles had the face of an emaciated mule with severe saddle sores. Agnès was one of the most beautiful women in the kingdom.
In various startling portraits in Loches, we see the look Agnès was channelling: the demi-topless, a line of dresses that left one breast exposed. It was a fashion all the court ladies were soon obliged to follow. On the well-endowed Agnès it looked fabulous; for an elderly pastry chef it might not have been ideal. Agnès was eventually murdered by Charles’s son Louis, who resented her influence, though I bet he missed the topless frocks.
Things were a little more cheerful upriver where the luminous limestone façade of Amboise rises above the riverside town. Tapestries hang on the walls and the Tour des Minimes, the original entrance, offers fine views over the Loire as well as into the courtyard where they hanged Protestants from the balconies during a little unpleasantness known as the Tumult of Amboise. Royal children, including Charles VIII and François I, were brought up here while their parents gallivanted between battles, mistresses and other châteaux. Both men were keen Italophiles. François brought the ageing Leonardo da Vinci to live at V Amboise. Charles brought France’s first syphilis epidemic.
The most famous of the Loire châteaux is Chenonceau, a country retreat of small private studies, book-lined libraries, and bedrooms with four posters and decorated fireplaces. Best of all are the long galleries that span the river like a
Castles are full of stories, and some of them are true
bridge, full of fluttering river light from tall windows on both sides. Sophia and I hired a boat for an afternoon of picnics and river dawdling. Across the still, green river the reflection of the château’s river arches trembled in our wake.
Henri II gave Chenonceau to his mistress, Diane of Poiters. Some 20 years his senior, Diane had been Henri’s nanny before graduating from cot to bed. When Henri’s wife, Catherine of Medici, was said to have had discreet holes drilled in some of Chenonceau’s walls so she could spy on the couple, she was astonished by their rampant lovemaking. Diane acted as Henri’s sex therapist. After prepping him on her sofa, she would send the king upstairs to his wife. Her work bore fruit. Catherine eventually gave birth to no fewer than 10 royal children.
When Henri died in 1559, Catherine forced Diane out of Chenonceau and moved in herself. From these quiet rooms, the Medici queen ruled France through three of her young and impressionable sons, François II, Charles IX and Henri III. And in the galleries that spanned the river she hosted infamous parties — musicians, fireworks, transvestites and naked nymphs.
Chambord — grander and fancier — never got to the debauched party stage. In the forests of the Solange, this is the most bizarre of all the châteaux. According to one writer, there was “a touch of madness in its conception”. Henry James called it “an exaggeration of an exaggeration”. Chambord was Francis I’s vanity project and one of the most extravagant buildings of the 16th century. It has 440 rooms, 85 staircases, 365 chimneys and 800 different kinds of capitals atop its forests of columns and pilasters; Francis’s sister complained she was always getting lost. Step outside on the flat roof and you find yourself in an architectural nightmare of dormers and turrets and domes and pinnacles and belfries and lanterns and balustrades. Sophia loved the double-spiral staircase. Its intertwining flights mean you may never pass anyone coming down.
François spent only 40 days of his 32-year reign here. It did enjoy a late revival as the home of the last Bourbon pretender, the so-called Henri V; the château was just about large enough to contain his vanity. When he was offered the French crown by a rightwing National Assembly in 1871, he haughtily refused, believing they had no real intention of turning the clock back to the good old days of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette. Chambord’s reputation for excess continues. This Disneyworld creation has 20 000 visitors a day at the height of the season.
Just up the road at Blois, a vast castle set around an inner courtyard, everyone seemed to have had at least a walk-on part. Charles d’Orléans, the “scholar of melancholy”, who spent 25 years in the Tower of London after the defeat at Agincourt, patrolled the arcades composing verses. Phillip the Handsome turned up with his wife, Joanna the Mad. François I built an entire new wing. Joan of Arc ghosted through the state rooms still trying to buck up the king. The Duc de Guise, the religious fundamentalist of his day, was murdered in an antechamber on the king’s order. Machiavelli plotted in a corner of the Salle des Etats while Catherine of Medici dispatched her Flying Squadron, a team of seductive female spies skilled in eliciting pillow talk secrets, to noblemen across France.
W
e tired of drama, of swaggering royalty, murder and mayhem. Maybe too many of the stories were true. We drove south, through a country that eddied around church spires. We were travelling into the landscape of Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s evocative novel of childhood nostalgia. Our last stop was the
Château d’Ainay le Vieil.
Built in the late 15th century, Ainay was a storybook castle with a drawbridge, a moat, several fat towers, a grassy courtyard and a resident family who had lived here for 560 years. It also has one of the most stunning gardens in France. More remote from the bloody sweep of history, Ainay retained a certain castle innocence. Here, we decided, was where fairytales were set.
The elderly Madame showed us around. Sophia liked her immediately, particularly when she produced a princess costume for her, and before long the two were hand-in-hand, coconspirators in all matters castle. She showed us the cobwebbed guards’ room above the drawbridge where she and friends had played. She pointed out the devil in the chapel frescoes that had so terrified her as a child. In the rambling gardens, she remembered her mother pruning the pear “chandeliers”. The last I saw of them, they were heading up a narrow staircase to inspect some miniatures of Marie Antoinette. Sophia was holding up the hem of her gown. “Don’t worry Papa,” she called over her shoulder. “I will be careful not to lose a slipper.”