What is a chateau??

Did anyone other than me always assume that a chateau was some kind of nice French country manor? A little bit fancy? A little bit quaint? A whole lot charming? Forget that! A chateau is a miniature castle and some of them are full on castles. The places are nutty and enormous. They scream, "I'm the lord of all I see...bow down to me French peasants!" I understand not a few of them were torched during the French Revolution - I wonder why?

The Chateau de la Rochefoucauld is a monster, a beautiful, beautiful monster. It was so easy to stand on the sloping green lawn and imagine begowned (I just made that word up) and bejeweled ladies strolling the grounds in powdered wigs and tiny hats, being attended to by fussy servants, and crushing simmering peasants beneath their heels.

I snapped a picture of everyone (note all the stylish hats) coming through the gate and up the path to the front door. The gate house was part of a much larger building...

the STABLES! Now that is one fancy horse house!! The stable of the Chateau de la Rochefoucauld could have easily held my house, and my sister Heather's house, and my parents house, and half my neighborhood. Good grief!

Here is a side view of the chateau. The ruined part in the center is actually the "keep" and is the oldest part of the building. Our understanding was that they were trying or wanted to rebuild it.

This is as close as we came to going inside. That is my one regret from the trip...I wish we would have toured the chateaus that we stopped to see. If we HAD gone inside, we would have seen a Gothic chapel, a guard's room, furnished bedrooms, a library, and the boudoir of Marguerite de Valois who was Queen of France and Navarre in the 16th century. Okay, so that got me wondering...what exactly is a boudoir? Well, it is a lady's bedroom, sitting room or dressing room and the word is derived from the French bouder, which means "to pout". Do women pout in their bedrooms? What is that all about?

Our next stop was the Chateau de Langeais, another castle/chateau that stood in the heart of Indre-et-Loire. We were walking along cobblestone streets, past charming shops, and then BAM - there it was. (Sorry, I think I just had an Emeril Lagasse moment.) It was originally built as a fortress in the 10th century by Foulques Nerra, the Black Count of Anjou (he was a really bad man - one of those raping, pillaging, burning type guys who also built two abbies and made pilgrimages to the Holy Land - freaky religious zealots are the worst!). The chateau was expanded by Richard I of England (a.k.a. Richard the Lionhearted) and later destroyed in the Hundred Years' War. King Louis XI rebuilt it in 1465, and the wedding of Anne of Brittany and King Charles VIII occurred there on December 6, 1491. I'm not much for wax figures and such but the wedding scene is recreated within the chateau and it would have been neat to see.

These gardens are part of the Chateau de Langeais' grounds...and are all fortified - of course. You never know when someone might try and take you out while you're enjoying an afternoon stroll.

In the background of this picture you can see a wall. The wall is actually part of the ruins of a donjon, or keep, which served as the dungeon. (OHHH! Donjon...Dungeon - wink!) This ruined wall is all that is left of the Black Count of Anjou's original fortress. The chateau's caretakers have set up a wooden walkway behind the wall where you can climb up and look through the windows. Sweet, eh?

Did I say we didn't go into any of the chateaus? I said that, but it's not an entirely true statement because we DID go into one...the Chateau de Brou. We, uh, actually stayed there! OVERNIGHT!! HA! Mom and Dad were really starting to hustle us along as the day stretched on. We ended up driving on all these back roads and through tiny towns that passed in a blink as we rushed by. Finally Dad pulled over to ask directions (all in a very hush-hush manner, but we couldn't have known what they were saying anyway since the entire conversation occurred in rapid-fire French) and this quintessential young French man with a hand rolled cigarette behind his ear hopped into his car and led us to where we needed to be. Dad drove down increasingly narrower roads until we pulled up to a big iron gate. Another indecipherable conversation ensued between dad and the intercom, the only part I caught was "la famille de Metcalfe", and then the gate swung wide and we drove into a forest. I'm not kidding, it was a forest, the woods, whatever you want to call it, complete with wild boar. We crept along the path feeling like we'd stepped back in time, when all of a sudden there was a break in the trees and we saw this:Of course, there was lots of girlie shrieking when we realized this was a super fancy B&B where my parents had rented four rooms and made reservations for a to die for, honest-to-goodness, four-course French dinner (more on that later). We admired the building in the rosy and quickly fading afternoon light...

walked in...and made ourselves at home. I found that my sweet parents, knowing that I am nutty about turrets, had reserved the Joan of Arc turret room for me. Jaime and squish-face Chase were my roomies. Here's mom and Chase hanging out in my room:

And here's me hanging with Joan.I still can't believe we stayed in a chateau and I stayed in the turret room...it was so much fun!