Let me tell you about the Loire Valley. The Val de Loire. For one thing, it isn’t a valley. There are no mountains in that part of France, two hours directly south of Paris.
Technically, I guess it’s a triangular area of flat land between the Loire and the Cher rivers before they meet at Tours, bordered on the northeastern base of the triangle by the Sologne, pine forests full of lakes and fishermen. Not so big, really. You could surely drive from the Sologne to Tours in an hour. Perhaps less.
It is famous for its beautiful skies and beautiful light, the Val de Loire. And its gentle climate. Supposedly warm air from the Atlantic comes up the Loire River and settles there, making the light filmy and keeping the flowers blooming well into winter. Nina says it is claimed to have a “microclimate” and also said that one winter coming down from Paris by train, she looked out of the window and saw a line across the countryside where the snow stopped and the brown and green fields of the Loire began.
Graham says it was the Miami of the Renaissance and that is why all the châteaux are here. It’s true. There are many châteaux, and they are hard to remember as they all start with “Ch”: Chenonceaux, Chaumont, Cheverny, Chambord.
Cornichons is situated so that there is a château in one direction or another within fifteen minutes to a half an hour max. Nina told me she has only two requirements of her guests. Either they speak French or they can drive a car. If they can speak French, she drops them off at a château and collects them later. If they drive, they can borrow an ancient Peugeot and go to do battle on their own. A guest who can do neither is little favored in the household of Nina and Graham, who have visited the châteaux all too often.
I can drive the Peugeot because my mother always had some sort of old stick-shift car. And I have a smattering of French from college, so I can at least order meals, ask directions, and am not hopelessly lost in a bakery.
There are many bicyclists in the Loire Valley because it is for the most part flat. In fact, I would call it the Loire Plateau. Once you bike up the steep clifflike hill from either the Loire River to the northwest or the Cher River in the southwest, the large fields and the small forests reach off with little incline. When I see German couples (they must be German) on bicycles built for two, I always wonder what resentment the hard-peddling husband in the front must feel for his lard-assed spouse in the rear, trying valiantly and red-faced not to be a burden, and failing. What does a bicycle built for two say about a marriage anyway? Most of the couples are on separate bicycles, zooming along independently. Though I notice the husband is always in front. It would be hell to spend your entire adult life being deferential, however slightly, to another person just because they are the opposite sex.
Then there are the trim men in lycra knee-length shorts and bright racing jerseys; quite old under their half-melon biking helmets. I’ve never found anything at all sexy about cyclists. Even champions. I’ve never envied Sheryl Crow’s making off with Lance Armstrong. No drugs? Why should he be the only one to abstain? Maybe if you have something going on with strong thighs, which I don’t particularly.
What is curious about the Val de Loire is that it is in a vague way equated with the Touraine, the region around Tours. And that it can include châteaux many kilometers from either the Cher or the Loire. In France, there is no need to really nail down one region from another. Under Napoleon the First, the Departements were established and are used by the government and the postal service. But the regions established in the early reign of the Capet kings remain the same in the people’s minds. You are only clearly out of the Touraine (and the Val de Loire) when the low, choppy, steep hills of the Berri to the south capture your car. Or the really endless wheat-covered plains of the Beauce to the north drag your eye to horizons that seem ever more distant.
Which is to say, I guess, you can be in the Val de Loire, or not, upon occasion. The call is yours. But once you are in the low forests filled with little lakes of the Sologne, which starts only some three miles from Cornichons, you know that this brooding, shadowy sadness has nothing to do with the glazed brightness of the valley.
And some days you know that you are in the Val de Loire and you could be nowhere else. I always feel there’s a special mood about Sunday. And if you had been in a coma for twenty years and you came to on a Sunday afternoon, you would know that it’s Sunday afternoon. The Val de Loire is a bit like that. The light seems full of gold dust, and the clouds are fat like cotton balls or a flock of sheep upside down, just overhead and completely motionless. The color of the sky is what I call Tiepolo blue. You know that blue he always used for those big ceiling paintings in Venice? I was there with my mother and the man I call “her present husband,” although I know they will be together forever, and nobody else ever painted with that sweet pale baby blue that could be lavender if you blinked. That’s the color of the skies on a summer day in the Loire Valley.
Nina said some people she knew, not well, came to visit and while they were driving across the fields of full sunflowers and grain the woman in the backseat said, “I don’t know why everyone comes here to paint. It looks just like Ohio to me.” Nina said she wanted to stop the car and order her out of it. And when they passed through an enchanted forest that looked like a stage set for Giselle, with all the branches of the trees interlaced overhead and ivy winding around the trunks, Nina said, “I think this is the most beautiful place in all the Loire Valley, and if anyone in the car disagrees with me, please keep it to yourself.” Graham says she can be sec when she wants to. Sec defines something in French we don’t really have in English. Somewhere around “sharp,” “pointed,” and “put you in your place,” I guess. She worked in advertising. That can’t be all sweetness and light.
Nina says that on summer mornings, when she throws open the old green wooden shutters and looks out at the chapel steeple almost touching the clouds and the sun is shining on the slate roof of the Abbey and there is the smell of roses in the air, she says to herself, “If you can’t be happy here, you can’t be happy anywhere.”