“Nature has certain effects
of boundless meaning,
rising to the level of the
greatest intellectual ideas.”
Honore de Balzac
Menars was a 2 million-rain drop experience, with a few thousand wipes of an oversized single windshield wiper on some French car I forget the name of. I don't even think they make that design anymore, but for five minutes it was the new thing but became passé very quickly.
We were now approaching 'châteaux land' of the infamous Loire Valley and the large stonewalls of the town ahead revealed nothing of their 'raison d'être'.
The 152 road wasn't the most picturesque in France, but it was a change from the péage, and we needed a change in pace.
Mustard yellow, flat, scrubby-looking fields were humorously dispersed on both sides, hosting the shortest dwarf sunflowers with oversized heads staring up like bedraggled orphans.
One assumed a sunflower had something to express, like a Van Gogh painting en masse they were a veritable chorus.
It had been a generally boring drive and I wondered why we had ever left magnificent Paris with no idea what magnificence lay ahead.
Now on wet grey roads surrounded by soggy brown wet fields, planted with nothing edible or inviting it didn't even feel like France.
If Van Gogh had come here earlier in the year, those famous sunflowers would have probably never been painted.
The Châteaux Menars had been in the hands of Madame de Pompadour 1760, who built two new additional wings on either side of the courthouse on a wonderful site overlooking the Loire, but she died just four years later, in 1764.
The ground floor central body presented a huge gallery and the main building still has three large rooms and an old central hall, but we discovered all this too late.
We saw nothing of the Jean-Jacques Charon terraced gardens, statues, 'Rotund of Abundance', the flowerbeds, lawns, canal, ponds, or avenues of elms planted in rows, because it was cold and raining so we got straight back into the car and drove away.