“But I speak of it as I saw
it last; full, tranquil,
powerful, bending in large
slow curves and sending
back half the light of the sky.”
Henry James (1843-1916)
Sitting in the car with maps spread out like a picnic I realised the valley 'Des Rois' was so aptly named.
Pictures that marked the château were numbered along the route, and I worked out we could visit numbers 3-18 in two and a half days, if we crossed the Loire or Cher 17 times.
I allowed one and a half hours for each visit, twenty minutes for lunch, and no stops for bathroom breaks.
This was going to be unrealistic so I then tried to work out how many trips were needed, for how many châteaux, for the entire valley, dived by how many years of life I had left.
It was also clear to me by the time we had done the last château years later that we might have forgotten the first one.
Like a first visit to Harrods, you forget where you started, and forget where you came in. It was all too difficult, and I concluded that I had just started far too late in life.
Amboise was where Henry II and Catherine de Medici moved to in 1551 to restore the French court and make it the centre of arts, but had a tragic episode.
A man called La Renaudie gathered a group of Huguenots, who had demanded freedom from the King at Bois and then decapitated, drowned, or hung them from the balcony.
The Arab Emir from Algeria was also imprisoned there for resisting an invasion by the French, until he was released by Napoleon III in 1852; a fact few Algerians still remark upon.
Only one-fifth of the châteaux survives today, when you look at the original foot print to me it represented 'full regional employment'.
Amboise was a huge and very impressive, renaissance château, but we missed it.
We drove into the town, got lost in the one way system, circled several more times and was thrown out onto an exit road. I knew Amboise was one of the largest because the picture on the map was large, but to us, it remained hidden.
It was embarrassing, but true.
I wondered if an invading garrison of soldiers occasionally missed the intended château, and ended up conquering the one next door by mistake.