Chateaux of the Loire Valley- Living as Nobles Before the Revolution

"S'il vient a point, me souviendra"= "If [the castle] is finished, I will be remembered". This quotation from Thomas Bohier, a royal official who oversaw the construction of the castle of Chenonceau between 1515 and 1521, is carved into a mantle piece in said castle and aptly describes how well the legacy of France's pre-Revolutionary nobility has been preserved in the Loire Valley.

The history of Chenonceau is rife with drama, and the events that took place within its walls would have been the subjects of sixteenth and seventeenth century tabloids, if such things had existed. King Henri II gave the castle to his favorite mistress, Diane de Poitiers, in 1547, and portraits of her still adorn her old bedroom. However, once the king died, his wife, the headstrong Catherine de Medici, took over Chenonceau and ordered de Poitiers to leave. This triangle can also be seen in carvings in some of the ceilings, where technically a C and an H are entwined, for Catherine and Henri, but their placement makes the C look like a D. Chenonceau was the site of many a lavish royal party and probably its fair share of controversy. Later, Louise de Lorraine, wife of King Henri III, inherited the castle and never left upon hearing of her husband's death. Her bedroom was painted all in black and she reportedly never wore anything but her white mourning clothes for the rest of her life.

Amboise was the permanent residence of Catherine de Medici and Henri II and was the only officially royal castle we visited. A small part of the interior has been reconstructed and furnished like the rooms at Chenonceau, but the most impressive part was the small chapel sitting in front of the castle. As the official royal home and the place where royal children were raised, Amboise does not have the same tawdry history as Chenonceau, and its most prominent feature is the influence of the Italian intellectuals invited by the French court to work there. The gardens are credited to an Italian priest, and the Chapel of Saint Hubert contains a memorial to Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his last years at Amboise. Whether he is actually buried under the chapel, I cannot know for sure, but the bilingual memorial (in French and Italian) was the most memorable feature of the visit.

From the outside, Chambord is spectacular, with its many towers and ornate decorations on the roof. It is somewhat of a maze, and we climbed all of the spiral staircases we could find and barely knew where we were half of the time. It seemed, however, that the restoration taking place had prompted the removal of many of the exhibits, making the castle feel kind of empty. The one obvious feature though was it use as a hunting lodge for Francois I. His initials adorn many of the walls, and many of the exhibits that were available featured weapons and tapestries displaying bloody animal carcasses. There was even this one really strange room where all there was was a projected image of trees and a soundtrack of howling dogs playing. No one could figure out the significance of that exhibit.

Cheverny is the smallest castle we visited, and it had a distinctly Victorian-seeming air to it, as opposed to the earlier centuries evoked in the others. The inclusion of memoirs and pictures of the family currently owning it made it feel a bit more modern than the others, as the exhibits seemed to encompass a wide span of the castle's history. It was never really used by the French royalty and feels more like a noble manor than the other castles, both in its layout and the content of the rooms. The exterior contributes to this as well, being less ornate and ostentatious than the others.

These large monuments have preserved nicely the legacy of the pre-Revolutionary aristocracy in the Loire Valley, but there is little evidence of the lower social classes from that era. Unable to afford the fortified homes of the nobility, their homes and workplaces have probably been long destroyed. The only trace I could find was a sign pointing toward Les Ormeaux, a town mentioned in George Sand's La mare au diable as where the poor farmhand Marie must go to make some money to support her mother. The vast difference in wealth illustrated here allows me to understand the discontent of the lower classes that led to the French Revolution.