Monday the 26th was the last full day before the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology conference got underway, so we decided to go see what lies west of Tours, having gone east on all our previous jaunts. More or less at random we chose Chinon as our destination.
Chinon is a little town sheltered between a big river and a big castle. The Loire flows past on the north and just behind the town is an impressive ridge crowned by the massive fortress of Chinon. It has been a military strong point since the days when the Romans built a fortified camp on the site, and over the centuries it was expanded by Franks, Merovingians, Capets, and Plantagenets.
One of the most famous events to happen at Chinon was the meeting between Joan of Arc and Charles VII of France. According to legend he was in disguise but she picked him out of a crowd of courtiers. I don't know if that's true, but I can understand why Charles was so freaked out by her arrival. A medieval monarch must have had a very hard time getting his mind around the concept that Joan was leading what amounted to a peasant revolt supporting him. That never happened before, as far as I can tell. Peasants tended to rebel against their lords, but picking one side in a dynastic dogfight was a new development. In this case I think Joan and the rest of the French commoners were just so damned sick of the Hundred Years' War that they decided to end it.
The fortress is mostly a ruin — not due to any assault by enemies, but mostly due to several centuries of being used as a free building material depot by the inhabitants of the town below.
We saw the whole thing, from the top floor of the Clock Tower (one of the few towers that didn't get dismantled) all the way down to the dungeons. Apparently some leaders of the Knights Templars were imprisoned at Chinon for a while, and what is said to be the room they were kept in features some grafitti cut into the walls, said to be by the Templar prisoners. Or maybe by someone else. Still, if Dan Brown wants to use this as material for a thriller, here's a photo.
Walking around a giant castle and climbing stairs all morning gave us a good appetite, which we satisfied at a restaurant called Au Local, just outside the castle gates. Highly recommended.
After a leisurely drive back to Tours, I dropped off the rental car while Diane signed in at the conference. She went off to some opening ceremonies while I dined in the old section of town, eating Andouillette and putting away a demi-bottle of local rosé wine. At the next table an intellectual-looking Frenchman about my age was sporting a "LOS ANGELES THUG LIFE COMPTON" t-shirt.
And so to bed.
Comments