Day 120: A fortress in France

This morning we drove to the village of Yèvre-le-Chatel, another member of the association of Les Plus Beaux Village de France (The Most Beautiful Villages of France). From as early as the tenth century, the village has been a popular defensive site, thanks to its location between Paris and Orleans. It contains the very impressive remains of a castle/fortress built during the 13th century under Philip Augustus, which was the only defensive stronghold north of the river Loire not to be captured by the English or the Burgundians during the 100 Years War.

When we arrived, the village was hosting an even smaller market than the one we had visited yesterday – one guy with a trestle table, some wine, bread and veges. We did a peaceful circuit of what proved to be a very pretty little settlement and then headed home for lunch and bit of School of Mum and Dad in the afternoon. 

 

Day 119: Not in the market

Kate has found a website that lists when and where the local French markets are on, so today we headed to the town of Montargis, known as the Venice of the Gâtinais due to its numerous canals and bridges. It snowed a little on the way there, and it was cold and drizzly when we arrived, and as the market was rather small and unremarkable, we looked around for somewhere to have a coffee, bought some bread and went back to our little bolthole for lunch.

Day 118: Museum piece

This morning we packed up and cleaned up and drove north to Troyes – the capital of the Aube region, which is part of Champagne-Ardenne. The city has been in existence since Roman times and has long been an important trading centre; the troy weight for gold is derived from the standard of measurement that evolved there. It’s extremely well preserved, with numerous half-timbered buildings large and small clustered around the old town. (Kate and I were convinced that we had already been there, but our total lack of familiarity with anything that we saw as we drove in and then walked around eventually convinced us that we hadn’t; we then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out which French towns or cities we were thinking of.)

It was very cold, so we headed straight for the information centre to get a map and warm up a bit. We were told there that almost all of the city’s museums were now free to enter, so we trotted over to the modern art museum (with a quick stop in the 13th-century Gothic cathedral on the way there). Troyes was also, for many years, France's knitwear capital, and the rather idiosyncratic art collection, which includes paintings and sculptures by artists including Braque, Degas, Matisse, Picasso and Rodin, had been amassed and then given to the state by husband-and-wife textile magnates. It’s housed in one of the more impressive of the city’s half-timbered buildings - the former episcopalian palace. 

We then headed across the road to the combined natural history, archaeology and fine art museum, which we had to tour rapidly as it was nearing the lunchtime closing time. Which was our cue to set about wandering the bitterly cold streets in search of somewhere to eat. As is so often the case, we struggled to find anywhere that fit our exacting standards, but finally, down a side street, we found a bustling Moroccan restaurant and managed to get the last table. Unfortunately, it was apparently just a husband-and-wife team, and they weren’t coping with the lunchtime rush, so we ended up waiting for an inordinate amount of time for our veal, almond and prune tagines (the plat du jour). The food, when it arrived, was very nice, however, and we were pleasantly replete by the time we got back on the road. 

 

Our final destination was the little village of Lorcy, about 30 kilometres east of Orléans. As we were getting relatively close to Paris now, our accommodation options were becoming narrower, more expensive and less characterful. Kate had managed to find tonight’s lodgings on Airbnb. It’s a funny little two-floor, one-bedroom place in a block set off the road. The owners live next door, and the English-free Pascal gave us a tour and directions to the nearest supermarket, to which we immediately decamped to grab some ingredients for dinner.

Day 117: Return to the restaurant

We went back for another lovely lunch at Le Sabot de Venus today. This time, we had carottes râpées (a delicious dish of grated carrot with cumin), filet mignon de porc à la moutarde and, much to Kate’s and Zoe’s delight, crème caramel. Again, the restaurant was busy – on this occasion, the large central table was taken over by a group of forestry workers. As before, all of the courses were really well cooked and beautifully flavoured.

On the previous visit, I had been much taken with the cute little ceramic mugs in which our coffees were served. On closer inspection, we found that they had been specially made for the restaurant – its name was written into the clay. So today, as we were leaving, we asked Sabrina about them and she gave us directions to the potter who made them (and called ahead to make sure she was there).

We drove over and were greeted by a very large, very friendly and muddy-pawed old English sheepdog. The potter, Laurence Petit, let us into the studio and we had a bit of browse. I found a few of the mugs – sadly in more pastelly colours than the gorgeous red ones in the restaurant – and grabbed two, along with a few other small items. After I had paid for them, Laurence started up her wheel and made some pots and other items so the girls could see how it was all done.

Day 116: Cheesy!

Today we drove to the medieval village of Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, which is a member of the Les Plus Beaux Villages de France (The most beautiful villages of France) association. It's also where they filmed the movie Chocolat.

We parked on the edge of the village and walked in, a light snow falling around us. As we reached the first buildings, a small tabby cat ran over and proceeded to follow us as we wandered around the village. It was almost lunch time, so we kept an eye out for somewhere to eat, but the village seemed to be almost completely deserted and there wasn't a single open establishment of any sort to be found. It was very beautiful, though!

Bellies beginning to rumble, we hopped back in the car and drove to the town of Semur-en-Auxois. However, our lunch-finding difficulties continued – the short menu du jour window had closed and each place we went into had run out – but we eventually managed to find somewhere half decent.

We were now a short drive from the village of Époisses, where my favourite runny, smelly cheese is made, so we popped over to buy a little round and have a coffee. The village itself is quite lovely, with a very impressive chateau at its centre. We had our coffee in a classic French bar/tabac/restaurant, where an elderly American woman was loudly translating her French guide to France to her rather bemused husband.

Day 115: An even quicker brown fox

We had a bit of light snow last night. After breakfast, we drove to Langres, a pretty walled town about half an hour away. We parked outside the town walls and walked in through an arch in the wall and into the town itself. We climbed up onto the city walls and then turned down a very narrow alley and into the town itself. It was very cold and we were feeling a bit peckish, so we popped into a cafe/

pâtisserie for a coffee and a cake. We then walked the length of the town looking for somewhere to have lunch, but were uninspired by everything we saw, so we hopped in the car and drove to a supermarket, bought some bread and cheese and went home for lunch.

 

In the afternoon, I went out for a bit of a walk on my own. The end of the lane on which our cottage is situated quickly turns into a rough track that runs along between a river and a forest-covered hillside. After a fairly short time, I spotted a dark shape on the grass next to the track up ahead and a little voice in my head said 'fox', but it was too far away to make out any detail and it was still quite light, so I ignored it and turned my attention to the hillside and the rather scrubby forest. Not long after, I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye and there, running across the track and into the trees, was a beautiful big fox with a bright white tail tip.

There has obviously been quite a bit of rain here recently, as many of the streams and rivers have broken their banks, and up ahead of me was a large area of water adjacent to the river, where a big white egret was hunting. After a while, I left the road and headed up the hill and into the forest. It's a very 'worked' forest, divided into coupes for cutting and with very few large trees. It clearly gets a lot of rain generally, as all of the rocks and fallen branches are covered in copious amounts of moss. Today, they also had a light coating of snow, making them stand out slightly eerily in the encroaching gloom like scattered animal bones. 

Day 114: Food, glorious food

As I mentioned in my previous post, I love France - the food (which covers everything from the dishes to the general warm embrace of everything that you could call 'food culture' – but with a special mention for the bread, the wine, the cheese and the many and varied ways that they cook duck), the language (hearing it, not speaking it - I could do without the idiotic, incredibly pedantic pronunciation), believe it or not, the people, who we've almost invariably found to be friendly, welcoming and helpful, and the architecture (and in particular the way in which it decays so very picturesquely). Kate still finds my Francophilia hilarious, because I was rabidly anti-French during our first visit 20-odd years ago – partly, I suspect, because I felt so uncomfortable with the language and had bought all those tales of the rude French, but largely because I had to spend a day in the French embassy queueing to get a single-entry, five-day visa. These days, I'm comfortable enough with the language to just about get by in the important situations (ordering/buying food and wine, mostly), and the two things I find most difficult to cope with are not being able to buy all of the beautiful, crumbling stone buildings bearing A VENDRE signs we pass and not being able to buy more of the beautiful, tasty food we see.

On this, our first morning back in France, we found that the frost that had greeted us on our arrival had thickened over night. Our breath swirled foggily around us we crackled and crunched out to the car. We drove first to Chatillon-sur-Seine, one of the larger nearby towns. Our first stop there was, naturally, a boulangerie – one that turned out to have an oven right in the shop and a baker preparing baguettes for baking. Welcome to France!

We wandered around a bit but the town itself was rather uninspiring, so we drove out through the fields and forest to the village of Bure les Templiers, where the owners of our house had said that there was a good restaurant – Le Sabot de Venus – serving traditional Burgundian food. It was only midday when we arrived, but the restaurant was open and there were even some diners in it. We were shown to a table and ordered three menus du jour – jambon perseille, roast park and pasta, and chocolate torte with a raspberry coulis – all for a mere 13.50 euros each. While we waited for our food to arrive, the adjacent tables filled up, the large one in the centre of the room taken over by the workers restoring the village church up the road.

Although we were in a tiny little restaurant in a tiny little village (as far as we could tell, this was the only establishment that actually served customers in the whole village), the food was sublime. The jelly in the jambon persielle really did taste of parley; the sauce on the roast pork was deeply flavoured and replete with small mushrooms, rich but not oily and a perfect match for the tender meat; the torte, again, was rich but not heavy, full of chocolatey flavour but surprisingly delicate and light, the sharp freshness of the raspberry coulis (absolute essence of raspberry) providing a perfect counterpoint. Sabrina, who served us, was friendly and warm, and we enjoyed the experience so much (including the cost - with coffees and a pichet of wine we were out of there with change from a 50 euro note)that we immediately booked a table for a few days hence.