Exploring the fairy-tale chateaux of the Loire Valley, Frank McDonaldhears tales of romance and war - and of savvy commercialism
It's quite strange, for an Irishman at least, to find oneself standing at the tomb of King Henry II of England, in the middle of the nave of the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud. There he is, in polychromatic painted stone effigy, clutching his sceptre, alongside the tomb of his wife, the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine. The tombs of Henry's son Richard the Lionheart and of Isabella of Angoulême, wife of King John, are just in front. Henry's is finer, however. The king who inaugurated "800 years of oppression" in Ireland died at the royal fortress of Chinon in 1189, after bickering with Eleanor and their three sons - dramatically depicted in The Lion in Winter. It was also at Chinon that Joan of Arc turned up in 1429 to persuade the reluctant French dauphin (later Charles VII) to join with her in the struggle to liberate France from English rule. More than a century earlier, in 1307, members of the Knights Templar were held prisoner there before being tried in Paris on trumped-up charges.
Stranger things are happening at Chinon now. Having being a ruin for centuries, raided only for its white stone, it is now the scene of an enormous amount of building activity. The royal quarters are being "rebuilt", even though there is no evidence that this is what they originally looked like.
Although Chinon has been a national monument since 1840, the project is being carried out by the councilof the department of Indre-et-Loire, to "restore" the site by joining up its three main elements - Fort St Georges, Château du Milieu and Donjon de Coudray - in order "to enhance both their heritage and tourism value".
The €14 million project also includes plans for a visitor centre on the site of St Margaret's Chapel, where Henry II died, and a new gate at the main entrance. The purpose is shamelessly touristic: to "improve the silhouette" of the fortress, which is spread out on an escarpment above the Vienne river, when viewed from the charming town of Chinon below.
There is a famous precedent: Carcassonne. Its medieval fortifications were in such a ruined state by the 1850s that they might have been demolished. Instead, they were rebuilt, in a rather fanciful way, by the French Gothic revivalist architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc; his achievement was recognised by Unesco, which designated it a World Heritage Site.
In 2000, World Heritage Site status was also conferred on the Loire Valley as "an outstanding cultural landscape of great beauty, containing historic towns and villages, great architectural monuments (the chateaux), and cultivated lands formed by many centuries of interaction between their population and the physical environment".
Chinon, though not strictly in the Loire Valley, is included in this vast World Heritage Site, which covers 854sq km, and so are the historic towns of Blois, Orléans, Saumur and Tours. But Unesco's honour was given mainly for the extraordinary number of chateaux - at least 200, large and small - peppered throughout the region.
The biggest by far is Chambord, a stupendous folly with 440 rooms, commissioned by François I - Henry VIII's contemporary (they even looked alike) - in 1519, with conical roofs, decorative chimneys, a double-helix staircase and extensive terraces from which to observe the hunt for stags and wild boars in its 13,000-acre wooded parkland.
More manageable is the Château de Chaumont, which stands on a bluff over the Loire with commanding views over the countryside. Once the residence of Catherine de' Medici and Diane de Poitiers (although not, of course, at the same time), it was bought in 1875 by Marie- Charlotte Say, heiress to a Nantes sugar fortune, who just had to have it.
This late-19th-century Barbara Hutton-like figure then married the Prince de Broglie and had the castle renovated to her taste, which included the installation in its dining room of a tiled floor from Seville. Owned by the French state since 1938, Chaumont now hosts a very popular garden festival, with a different theme every summer.
The less visited Château de Talcy retains furniture from the 18th century, in dark rooms that combine ancient wooden beams and wall panelling of later vintage. The 16th-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard's most famous work, Les Amours de Cassandre, was inspired by his falling in love with Cassandre Salviati, the daughter of the castle's Florentine owner.
Talcy, built in the 1520s, is Gothic rather than Renaissance in style, and is therefore something of a peculiarity in the Loire Valley. Preserved in its courtyard are a press house (for grapes) and an impressive dovecote, and just beyond is a large fruit and vegetable garden, laid out in Renaissance style, with elaborately trained apple and pear trees.
The most outstanding garden in the region - perhaps the finest in Europe - is at Château de Villandry. The last of the great Renaissance chateaux of the Loire, it is also one of the few that remains a family home, lovingly cared for by Henri Carvallo (great-grandson of the Spaniard who bought it in 1906), his wife and three children.
Dr Joachim Carvallo had been collecting Spanish pictures from the 17th century, but there wasn't enough room for them in the Paris apartment he shared with his rich American-born wife. So they decided to buy a country house somewhere in France and ended up purchasing Villandry, which was then so run-down it was about to be demolished.
Carvallo set about restoring the chateau and its Renaissance garden, which had been turned into a rolling parkland in the 18th century, based on evidence from old engravings. Arranged on three levels, the gardens are delightful, even enchanting; last year they drew more than 330,000 paying visitors.
The Jardin d'Eau is on the highest level, with fountains and a reflecting pool surrounded by pleached lime trees. Then there are the ornamental gardens, of music, love and simple delights, fringed by a pergola of vines, and, finally, the kitchen garden, planted with all sorts of vegetables, including purple cabbage.
On a guided tour of the chateau and gardens, Henri Carvallo told us that the €8 admission fee goes to employ 10 full-time gardeners, who plant vegetables twice a year - most of them are given away to lucky visitors - and clipping no less than 50km of box hedges as well as yew topiary and hundreds of pleached limes.
Whenever he has spare funds, the money goes to repairing the roofs of the chateau, buying back pictures that were in his great-grandfather's collection or others, such as four paintings depicting the Marquis de Castellane, who owned Villandry in the late 18th century, presenting his credentials as French ambassador to Istanbul.
After outbidding the Turkish government to acquire these pictures, Carvallo hung them in the chateau's Oriental Room, under a magnificent Mudéjar coved ceiling. When asked if he is ever overwhelmed by the responsibility of looking after Villandry, he said: "I feel it's a duty, but it's also a pleasure." Just the right frame of mind for any serious chatelain.