We have spent a good part of this trip dazzled….by sunlight, by that sunlight reflected off impossibly blue water (river and sea), by beautiful architecture, amazing landscapes filled with ever changing fall colours, art of all descriptions (including some pretty amazing graphiti and street art). I’ve run out of adjecctives. If sights had calories, our eyes would be well on the way to obesity.
As we sit or stand awestruck in yet another amazing cathedral/country church/abbey/chateau/ruined fortifications/Roman theatre, jaws around our knees somewhere, we are overcome with an undefined emotion somewhere in the range of awe, respect, amazement, incredulity, envy at the wonders that have been wrought.
The soaring ceilings of the churches and cathedrals, built hundreds of years ago without the benefit of computer 3-D assistance, slide rules and other wizardry of the sort, cranes, cement mixers and big machinery, or the ability to measure incredibly accurately as we do now. The amazing carvings on the pulpits. The artwork and frescoes on walls, doors, highway guard rails….. some by famous painters, others by someone history forgot to record. The stonework on the walls and floors. The mosaic labryinths. The stained glass windows. The acoustics are pretty amazing too, and there’s something very appropriate about Gregorian chants in a Cistercian abbey.
My imagination can’t cope with envisioning the construction of what we’ve seen.
Some of the builders are remarkable. One guy we met, through his chateau in Burgundy, was Marshal de Vauban, who acquired a place called Chateau Bazoches in 1675. He should have inherited it from his grandmother, Francoise de la Perriere except while she was the only heir, she was illegitimate (although acknowledged) and her father died without a will, depriving her of this portion of her inheritance. Apparently the legal proceedings on the death of her father were ruinous. And her son was still paying them off years after SHE died. And the family still didn’t own the chateau.
But fate took a hand through the man history knows as the Sun King.
Seems Vauban was nothing short of a genius….one of those incredible people who show up in history every hundred or so years. Louis XIV (the Sun King), loved the man for all he did. And he did a lot….he was a soldier, an engineer, a strategist, an architect, an economist, a politician, a writer and a philosopher. He was wounded six time in battle (his actual battered armour is on display in the chateau along with a sculpture of him with a big dent in his cheek, the result of a bullet to the face that obviously didn’t kill him), took part in 49 sieges and built or fortified 160 fortresses. And he spent 57 uninterrupted years in LXIV’s service, which kept him traveling all over France. Historians estimate he travelled 180,000 kilometres on horseback or mule drawn carriage.
At any rate, back in 1675 Louis gave him 80,000 Livres (the currency of the day) for taking the town of Maastricht, a Dutch town which Louis had besieged. Vauban, who was Louis’ director of fortifications, put into practice a system of parallels he invented, which was a way of protecting attackers very effectively. Seems the system worked. He took the town in less than two weeks with very little loss of human life (sadly, d’Artagnan of Three Musketeers fame was apparently one of those lost in battle. Ken and I want to know what happened to the other two!).
These sieges usually took several months and caused heavy casualties so you can imagine how tickled Louis was when Vauban succeeded so quickly. (One of the displays in the chateau shows how this system of parallels works. It arranges attackers in a series of parallel chevron-shaped formations which allows them to move forward while being protected by each other and a series of trenches.)
His writings covered military life, weapon and fortifications. He wrote 12 volumes of what he referred to ironically as “my pass times” which covered such things as the construction of lantern-towers (we know them as lighthouses), inland navigation, the need to populate Canada (350-odd years ago he estimated Canada’s 1970 population would be 25 million — he was out by a million –not bad estimating. . . budget forecasters should talk to him) and a whole series of agricultural treatises, including how a pig could save the poorest people in the land. Apparently a sow produces some six million descendants over a decade. Of course the sow would need some help from a boar or two along the way.
But now to the chateau itself. It was built between 1170 and 1190, near Vezelay in Burgundy. It’s a trapezoid (four sides, no sides equal or parallel — imagine me remembering that from high school trig classes 50 odd years ago).
Built around the time of the third crusade, one of the first guests of any note was Richard the Lion Heart who stopped at a near by church apparently on his journey to fight the infidels.
The chateau’s basic footprint has survived the Hundred Years War, the Wars of religion, and the Fronde (a series of civil wars in the mid 1600s) without damage. Vauban changed a few things, but left it structurally unchanged.
From the gallery, which he used as a design office, Vauban directed activities across France. Imagine in a day without email, wifi or even telephones, the courtyard must have been a flurry of activity as his messengers rode off to all parts France with his instructions and plans. He apparently even modified his own mode of transportation so that he could work while he travelled.
Vauban is still held in the greatest regard by engineers. Damage to the base of the chateau came to light during filming of a TV program on the place during the 1960s and the French Minister for the Armies and a regiment of army engineers dredged the moat, removing 10,000 cubic metres of earth to fix the problem.
Apparently Vauban’s travels were not restricted to France. He seemingly visited one of the Tuscan towns we toured recently (forget which one, blush) and according to the guidebook approved of the town’s plan and layout.
But to the chateau. It is beautiful. Its vista is stunning: it sits on a hillside and commands a view of the valley and opposite hills. Even in November its grounds were beautiful. Individual rooms are charming and have obviously been a home to families, not just a place to live or entertain.
Vauban was on the road for Louis most of the time, but his wife, who he treated as an equal at a time when women were mere chattel, (he gave her power of attorney!!!) not only kept things going, but improved them. (He was apparently at the chateau an average of 22 days a year. Talk about a demanding boss!)
Several things about the chateau intrigued or impressed me.
The library:
- the estate owns more than 8,000 books. About 5,000 were on display including some very rare illuminated manuscripts. The books were contained in several rooms, floor to ceiling, wall to wall book cases, making me drool with envy.
Early in my communications career, I had opportunities to go to print shops and watch the lead type setting process and the four colour print process, complete with colour separations. These are a thing of the past and it’s sad because it was like magic watching colour come from four negatives. I worked with artists who illustrated my technical writing with hand drawn, hand painted creations.
So, I have always had enormous respect for books and how they are produced. The thousands of books i saw at the chateau had me almost speechless with awe. Some were hand written and by this I mean not typeset. All were hand bound on hand-made paper.
Producing a book today, given e-books, doesn’t even include paper. To produce books such as we saw in the Chateau’s library involved, besides the writer and editor, people who made the paper, either typesetters or copiers, engravers, tanners who made the leather covers, the people who applied the gold leaf on the covers, and the people who bound the book when it was finished. No small task. No small cast of people involved. I can’t even guess how long it took to produce a book.
The Needlework:
-the six armchairs and the bed covering in the Marshal’s bedroom, were made with 80 pieces of silk and wool tapestry worked in petit point then sewn together, a task I cannot even imagine beginning much less completing. I stitch, I weave. I have a problem finishing things, so I was amazed. And centuries later the fabric and the needlework are still in amazing condition, colours only slightly faded.
The family tree:
This unique take on a family tree covered four large panels in the gallery and traces ownership of the chateau from its construction to today. Each of these panels was about 10 feet square, and was made up of hand painted and fired Limoges porcelain squares. There are nearly a thousand of these individual pieces of art.
The work was painstaking because a coat of arms is a legal entity so colours and each component, each detail are carefully and rigorously precise. Ask anyone who works for any level of government about when they can use that government’s coat of arms, and in fact who can use it, and you will get an indication from the rules involved how precise and controlled they are.
Over its life, Chateau Bazoches has had 40 different owners, representing 20 different families. What’s interesting to me is how intertwined history is and the families fall into two main lines. even more interesting is that the current husband and wife who current own the chateau can each trace their family tree back thourgh 27 generations to the man who built the place.
I have to confess though, that I took the guidebook at its word over this….I was not in fact persistent enough to make it through the four panels of coats of arms, or the huge family tree in the guide book to verify this. Sometimes you have to trust the written word, and this was written at the bottom of the family tree in the guide book.
Most of the manors and castles we have toured in the UK have been taken over by the government or by the National Trust. In France most of the monuments are privately owned. Except for places such as Versailles, guide books are almost unheard of….information on what you are seeing is usually contained on sheets of laminated paper you have to return when you leave the chateau, so having a guidebook, in English at that, available for this chateau was for me, a real gift.
It’s not easy owning an historic building. Ownership comes with responsibilities and the current owners, ultimately decided to open its doors to the public after five years of major restoration and refurbishment
They had to in order to make ends meet. When I read that I thought back to Downtown Abbey, the programs I had watched about its setting, Highclere Castle, and what its owners do to make those same ends meet.
And that means people like us get to go in and see and experience history. What a treat. What good fortune for us.
Vauban is a name we have read frequently in our research when travelling to France. We were pleased to have had the chance to meet the man by seeing his chateau.
