If That Was a Castle, Then What is This?

Château de Blois

First stop on this last day of our bus trip was this four part castle in Blois, France, and the castle is appropriately named, the Château de Blois.  This interesting home/government building/architecture lesson is right in the center of town, and as usual, sits on the highest point.  It is a square structure with four sides that all face an open courtyard, and the four sides provide a very clear cut lesson in architectural history. 

This little white section is what's left of the Middle Ages Structures built in the 10th and 11th Centuries.

This wing is a great example of the Flamboyant style of architecture, a movement that was pronounced but short lived, falling between Gothic and Renaissance, sometimes just considered early Renaissance.

This is your Renaissance wing, with a very famous staircase down the center.  It looks like an ordinary Gothic spiral staircase, but what is nearly impossible to put in a picture is the double helix design.  This is really two staircases that spiral around each other in such a way that if you go up one set of stairs you cannot see who's coming down the other set.  It is said that the king at a the time had it built so that his wife and mistress would not have to see each other as they moved through the palace!  What a life!!

This is the Classical wing with it's columns and straight lines.  Built by Louis XIII, this wing is incomplete because he ran out of money and future kings never bothered to finish it.  If you look closely this is evidenced by the lower columns; some are fluted and some are partially fluted, and some are not fluted at all.  

Every castle has it's chapel.

Here is an example of one of those portable desks I talked about a blog or two ago.  See the handles on the side for easy moving?

Darian, Char and Chloe killing time waiting for the tour to start.

My roof tops

History lesson time:  As you can see, on the left there is a giant tapestry hanging.  As we've seen in other castles these were for centuries the way that walls were decorated.  About this time though during the Renaissance, there was a move towards painting walls instead of ordering, weaving, and hanging tapestries.  The walls in this castle were painted, each room with it's own design.  You can see it in the other pictures. So I was thinking, without any research to back me up, I'm wondering if the next step in the evolution of wall decor was the wall paper that we still use today.  What do you think?

Just a beautiful instrument. 

These wood panels were gorgeous.  Each panel had a unique design carved into it, and as you can see, some of the panels opened into hidden cabinets, a popular way to display your riches in those days.  When the panels are closed they disappear completely into the rest of the wall.

An original bed from this time period. (But I'm still wondering how these royals actually slept in a room with so much going on!)

Also, not far from here Henri de Guise, a representative of the Protestant church, was murdered with the blessing of the king, in an effort to cripple the Protestant movement in the religious wars of the day.

This great hall was the largest open space of it's kind that was not a cathedral, and was reserved for banquets, balls, and government meetings.

For me, the most interesting thing about this castle is that this is the spot where Joan of Arc gathered and organized her army before going to war in 1429.  It's hard to believe it's only marked by this little plaque on the side of the wall.

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Château de Chambord

So, if castles is what I saw yesterday, then I don't know what to call this!  With 440 rooms, 218 fireplaces and 84 staircases, it's hard to know where to start.  This castle was also built with a mistress in mind since  Francois I built it to be near his mistress who was married to someone else on an adjoining estate. (It would have been fun to be a tabloid writer back then, don't you think?)  It is estimated that in his lifetime Francois spent only 72 nights here!

It was built as a hunting castle and as a way to display the wealth and power of France, with immense grounds covering more area then the entire city of Paris.  Unfortunately it was one of the most poorly organized tours of our week, and as we wandered through the halls we never really knew where we were, or what we were looking at.  Luckily, to be honest, we were too tired to care, but don't tell my professor that!  We just enjoyed it for its "wow power!"

Some rooms were decorated....

....and some were not...

....others were in complete disrepair....

....some just had racks on the walls, all four walls actually, I just thought I would spare you another picture....

....and one had a pool table and a couple of statues.

Just for fun there was a royal crown, but no indication of who it belonged to.

A bedroom...but you probably knew that!

Courtyard

The tallest bed I've seen in France!

And I keep meaning to get a picture like this. It's obviously spring time here and the end of the school year which is apparently field trip season here just like it is in the U.S.  We see school groups like this everywhere we go and it actually makes the days a bit more fun!

An average view!

As always, the church

I thought the most interesting part was wandering around on the roof top through all the spires and turrets. It was fanciful, kind of mysterious, and of course...

The views were spectacular!

Then, randomly in a bunch of the rooms there was modern art--of course!  This is just one example, but there were also, in other random rooms some very surrealist paintings, a multi-media piece, and modern sculpture!  Go figure!

After the castle we went for lunch and had another funny food moment.  In my first French class one of the vocabulary words was "citron presse," and we were told that that was a fresh squeezed lemonade.  Well, awesome, I love lemonade, so when we saw it posted as a menu item I went for it.  What I got was this glass with about 1 inch of fresh squeezed lemon in the bottom, then they handed me a bottle of water and one packet of sugar!  It was so funny as I tried to juggle all that to my table with my other bags and pamphlets.  As it turned out, we also had to go back and get 3 more packets of sugar just to make it sort of sweet!  But we all enjoyed a swallow of "citron presse!"  Another cultural moment under my belt!