See you there… or rather here.

Half-timbered buildings, maisons à colombages, in Troyes. Photo GLK

They can be found here and there throughout France, mostly dating from the late 15th to the early 19th centuries. Alsace and Normandy are especially known for them. Brittany and Burgundy and Champagne also have some fine examples, as does the town of Angers, just north of the Loire Valley.

The photos on this post were all taken in the town of Troyes (pronounced like the French number three, trois), which is located in the department of Aube in the southern portion of the Champagne region, just north of Burgundy and 110 miles southeast of Paris. Click here for map:
Agrandir le plan

The skeleton of a maison à colombage is made from timbers that are further supported by various fillings such brick, chalk, plaster and most commonly an impermeable mix called torchis. Torchis is a mix of clay, chopped straw, lime, and sand that provides relatively good isolation. The filling or the entire façade may then be covered with roughcast or wooden or slate shingles.

In the 17th, it became fashionable to fully cover half-timbered façades with plaster or roughcast so as to make the building appear less rustic, more luxurious. Nowadays, however, showing the timbers has the edge in terms of charm.

Half-timbered houses on Place Alexandre Israel, Troyes. Photo GLK.

Troyes made its mark on the map of Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries due to major commercial fairs that were held here because of the town’s privileged situation along the north-south trade route (the old Roman Agrippian way) from Italy to northern Europe and because of the relative independence of the Counts of Champagne, who controlled this region at the time.

Favorable trade winds returned to Troyes in the 16th-century and allowed for a handsome reconstruction of the town after a devastating fire in 1524, resulting in many of the half-timbered buildings seen today. The bon-bon colored commercial heart of the town is so attractive today thanks to a vast restoration project launched in the 1960s.

There nevertheless remains a certain rustic charm to the less rehabilitated zones just outside of the commercial center and to its non-restored buildings such as this.

Unrestored half-timbered building in Troyes. Photo GLK

Portions of Troyes’ cork-shaped city center is carfree, allowing for an attractive visit for a 2-3-hours walk-about if passing this way or for a full daytrip or an overnight. Other than the cavernous cathedral, the main views and squares and points of interest are in the body of the cork, including its most notable religious monument, Saint Madeleine Church, which has some beautiful wooden sculptures and intricate stonework…

Rood screen or jubé in St. Madeleine Church, Troyes. Photo GLK.

… but is especially noteworthy for its 16th-century stained glass windows, including this excerpt depicting the creation of the world by a man with a beard.

Detail of the creation of the universe, St. Madeleine Church, Troyes. Photo GLK.

Another man with a beard and a hat associated with Troyes is Rachi (1040-1105), a foremost Talmud and Biblical scholar who lived in Troyes. The Rachi Institute is adjacent to a synagogue which occupies a 16th-century half-timbered former abbey, two blocks from Saint Madeleine. 

La Maison de l’Outil et de la Pensée Ouvrière, a tool museum a library dedicated to “working class thought,” isn’t for everyone, but you know that manly thrill you get when looking for the precise screw or awe in a hardware store? Well, you’ll find it in historic spades when visiting this collection of 10,000 tools particularly from the 17th and early 20th centuries. This is one of the best technical-minded museums in France. “Working class thought” is accounted for in books devoted to working-class life and culture and to technical studies.

As for the feminine thrill of selecting stockings and other knitwear, Troyes’s Musée de la Bonneterie/Hoisery Museum gives a wonderful glimpse of what Troyes was especially known for from the middle of the 18th century until the early 20th century.

Touring tips
Troyes, population 64,000 (120,000 with the suburbs), makes for an excellent daytrip from Paris (about 90 minutes by train) or for a stop while driving between Paris and Burgundy.

The textile industry is still present in and around Troyes, providing about 10,000 jobs, which explains the many factory outlets on the outskirts of the town at three main centers: Marques Avenue, Marques City, and McArthur Glen. 

Though this area is removed from the heart of the Champagne-producing part of the region, a large swatch of Champagne grape vineyards lie 25 miles southeast of the town. If looking to visit a Champagne house in the area, Drappier would be a worthwhile choice, as mentioned in my 3-day Champagne Diary.

I enjoyed an overnight in the fine, central, contemporary 4-star hotel Relais Saint Jean. For good choices in all categories and for further practical information about Troyes, visit the website of the Troyes Tourist Office.

- Text and photos: GLK

Marianne leads the French into battle, soothes them with her confident, compassionate gaze, sustains them with pride, honors their dead. As an allegory of The Republic she is represented in village, town, and city halls throughout France. Since the 1960s the bust of Marianne has been modeled successively after celebrities: Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Mireille Mathieu, Laetitia Casta.

The Marianne most seen by visitors to France is the figure leading soldiers to battle in the sculptural scene entitled “La Marseillaise” on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

This photo, however, shows a version of Marianne by the sculptor Paul Belmondo (1898-1982), who was born to Italian parents in Algeria. Created in 1933, the bust is entitled “Marianne or The Republic so-called of Algiers.” It is found at the Paul Belmondo Museum in Boulogne-Billancourt.

- text and photo GLK.

Imagining what constituted progress in northern France and Belgium during the First World War is more difficult. Films are fewer, books are more complex, and battle maps look like tidal maps on a coast of shifting sandbars.

As to travels, well, I decided to start with a guide.

Olivier Dirson in the Somme American Cemetery. Photo GLK

I met with Olivier Dirson for an afternoon’s expedition to the battlefields surrounding Saint Quentin, 102 miles (165 km) northeast of Paris, in the region of Picardy. Olivier would take me to several battle sites, monuments, cemeteries, and reconstructed towns and villages, within a 10-mile radius of Saint Quentin. By the end of the afternoon I would begin to understand how the events in that area fit in with the larger picture of the First World War. I would also get a sense of how Olivier’s own personal history fits in with the larger picture of France.

His father was born in August 1944, “on the day that Saint Quentin was liberated by American forces,” Olivier notes. That’s a coincidence of course, especially considering that Olivier’s grandparents didn’t live in Saint Quentin. But what follows was not.

In 1959, his paternal grandmother wrote to Charles de Gaulle, who a year earlier had been elected president of France, to ask if he would accept to be her daughter’s godfather. Surprisingly, de Gaulle, with whom the family otherwise had no connection apart from that of the nation as a whole, wrote back to say that he would accept, provided that his godchild be named Anne, after his daughter who, born with Down syndrome, had died at the age of 20 in 1948.

Eight years later, 1967, Olivier’s father was looking for work, and through family correspondence with the de Gaulles, he was offered a job as gardener at La Boisserie, the de Gaulle family home in Colombey-les-deux-églises in the region of Lorraine. While working there he and his wife lived nearby in Chaumont-en-Champagne. That’s where Olivier was born in 1969, the year de Gaulle left office and retired to La Boisserie. But the Dirson family, like the rest of France, was moving on. Never a gardener by vocation, his father took and passed the national exam to become a policeman and that same year the family moved to Picardy.

Olivier therefore grew up a Picard yet the family regularly vacationed in nearby Normandy, specifically the resort town of Cabourg, just outside the D-Day Landing Zone. Olivier remembers visiting the D-Day Beaches with his father when he was 7 or 8 and of wanting to return to explore even when the rest of the family, including his father, had tired of it. His father eventually retired to and still lives in Cabourg, and Olivier now takes his own family there on vacation. His/Their connection with the history, memory, sites and cemeteries of Invasion of Normandy continues.

But Olivier is a Picard, not a Norman, and Picardy is particularly marked by the events of WWI, a war defined not by the vast sweeping of troops across sea and land, but by trench warfare and millions of men inching their way back and forth across ridges, valleys, quarries, fields, and canals in a tug-of-war lasting four year. His childhood interest in WWII led to an adult interest in WWI and in-depth study of the battlefields in his own backyard. (I find that same backward chronology among men who first visit Normandy and then get curious about the battlefields of the previous war.)

American WWI monument in near Saint Quentin, France.

After years working in human resources, Olivier beefed up his knowledge of the history and (in)humanity of WWI and its aftermath, created the company Chemins d’histoire (Paths of History) and in 2009 took his passion on the road by giving battlefield tours.

Saint Quentin, 70-90 minutes by train north of Paris, is Olivier’s home base, but he will also meet travelers arriving in Amiens or Lille, depending on the traveler’s particular interests: the Battle of the Somme, the Hindenburg Line, Vimy Ridge, Fromelles, even Flanders.

Driving a van that can accommodate up to seven passengers, Olivier leads personalized half-day, full-day, and extended tours adapted to the interests and background of his clients. One naturally wants to tour sites and cemeteries associated with one’s own nationality; nevertheless, understanding the international nature of WWI is extremely significant in grasping the scope of the war, so a parallel curiosity about the sacrifices of other nations will be well rewarded. Among Olivier’s talents as a guide, I found, is his ability to adapt his presentation to the nationality of his clientele (American, Canadian, English, Australian, New Zealander, or other) without being patronizing. He also enjoys sleuthing around to find traces (graves and troop movements) of the ancestors of his clients.

During my afternoon tour we focused on the zone of the war’s endgame where the Hindenburg Line gave way in late September and early October 1918. We also visited several specifically American sites, including the Somme Cemetery, one of eight American military cemeteries of the First World War, near the town of Bony ten miles north of Saint Quentin, and, several miles from there, the Bellicourt Monument, erected above the canal that was an important part of the Hindenburg Line and commemorating American efforts in helping to break that line of German defense. (More on those and other sites will appear in a separate article later this summer.)

Somme Cemetery. Photo GLK

Apart from his work as a guide, Olivier is president of the association Les Parrains de la Mémoire—France Remembrance Association, whose mission is to remember and honor the sacrifices of Americans who fought alongside the French and British Armies in 1917 and 1918. Members undertake to recognize the sacrifice of foreign soldiers through the laying of flowers on one or more graves at least once per year, if possible on American Memorial Day. Created in 2007, the association further seeks to transmit that gesture of remembrance to future generations and therefore encourages family membership so as to involve children and grandchildren in the laying of flowers. Olivier, his companion Marjorie, and their 9-year-old daughter Tara each “sponsor” a soldier’s grave. In the photo above, Olivier is standing in the Somme American Cemetery by the tomb of John A. Norton that he flowers each year during the Memorial Day ceremony at the cemetery.

Echoing Olivier’s interest in the battlefields of WWI through his interest in those of WWII, Les Parrains de le Mémoire was inspired the efforts of remembrance by Les Fleurs de la Mémoire, a similar association concerned with the American war cemeteries of Colleville (Omaha Beach) and Saint James (near Mont Saint Michel) in Normandy.

Guide or no guide, by forward or backward chronology, the battlefields and cemeteries of France aren’t just sights for war buffs. They are places of history, large and small, international, national, and personal.

- Text and photos GLK

Links
Olivier Dirson, Chemins d’histoire: www.cheminsdhistoire.com
Saint Quentin Tourist Office: http://www.tourisme-saintquentinois.fr/
Aisne Tourist Board (department which includes Saint Quentin): www.evasion-aisne.com/en/
Picardy Tourist Board site (region which includes Aisne): picardietourisme.com/en/index.aspx
Les Parrains de la Mémoire (Picardy): parrainsdelamemoire.free.fr
Les Fleurs de la Mémoire (Normandy): fleursdelamemoire.free.fr

Luminous by its vast, clear windows, by the light streaming in from its lantern tower, and by its bright, naked stone, Notre-Dame de Laon on a sunny day is a beacon calling the traveler well off the beaten track. If you know the other Notre-Dames north of the Loire Valley, now consider Laon’s.

The architecture styles and developments of the 12th through 15th centuries that became known as Gothic during the Renaissance were previously known as the manner of building in Ile-de-France (the Paris region) or simply the French arts. Indeed, many of the primitive Gothic (begun 1135-1190) and classic Gothic (begun 1990-1230) monsters of France (and of Europe) lie within a 100-mile radius of Paris: Saint-Etienne de Sens, Basilique Saint Denis, Notre-Dame de Laon, and Notre-Dame de Paris for primitive Gothic, Notre-Dame de Chartres, Notre-Dame d’Amiens, Notre-Dame de Reims, and Saint-Pierre de Beauvais for classic Gothic.

Laon’s cathedral is a first-generation Gothic construction started in 1155, eight years before Paris’s Notre-Dame. It replaced a Romanesque cathedral that had been heavily damaged by fire in 1112 and partially repaired before a complete renewal was decided.

In order to understand the construction of Notre-Dame de Laon and its cousins in the Paris region and beyond, opt for a guided tour when visiting the cathedral. Furthermore, the tribune (second floor walkabout) and towers can only be visited with a guide.Inquire about tours directly at the tourist office or better yet contact the tourist office in advance.

It’s rare nowadays to have access to the tribune of medieval churches and cathedrals. Along with allowing wonderful views of the interior, the tribune displays some of the building’s original late 12th-century and early 13th-century sculptures, copies of which now decorate the outside. (At Laon, as in other Gothic cathedrals, much of the stone and the sculptures were originally painted.)

There are these gargoyle gutters, for example:

And these column capitals:

And I love the wind-worn limestone of these works that could well be presented in a museum of contemporary art:

The next photo, taken from the outer landing of one of its five towers (of seven originally planned) and looking up to the top, shows the stone oxen that are a sculptural oddity at Laon, They recall the legend by which an ox miraculously appeared to replace an exhausted ox that could go no further while its yoke was pulling stones to the top of the plateau for the construction of the cathedral. The mysterious ox then disappeared once it had helped deliver the stones to the top.

Looking to the west, here is a view over the Upper Town, which is surprisingly (and sadly) quiet since most of the town’s businesses are in the Lower Town, where most Laonnois reside. Actually, that quiet makes a visit here feel even more like an unusual find.

The choice café and restaurant is naturally situated across from the cathedral, as seen above.

Loan is the capital of the department of Aisne, an area that is part a swath of Belgium and northern France—Verdun, the Ardennes, the Somme—that witnessed the incessant trench warfare that defined WWI. Laon nevertheless survived the fighting from 1914 to 1918 unscathed because it was occupied by Germans throughout much of the war and lay behind the front. Allied bombing in 1944 later caused damage around the train station and elsewhere, but the Upper Town was largely spared.

The Upper Town of Laon occupies what is geographically the last outlier plateau of the Paris region. Another such hill, the infamous Chemin des Dames (The Ladies Road) can be seen at the horizon in this photo taken from the cathedral’s south tower.

The Chemin des Dames, a narrow plateau, 18 miles long and 110 feet high, overlooking the plain between Laon and Reims, was of great strategic importance during the The First World War. For more on the Chemin des Dames click here.

Getting to Laon
Loan, 85 miles northeast of Paris, is about 1 hour 40 minutes by train from Paris’s North Station, Gare du Nord. About 20-minutes outside Paris on the train (past the suburb of Mitry and before Dammartin) you’ll notice that the landscape changes quickly from crowded suburbia to vast agriculture. The fields are largely reserved by the four main crops of northern France: wheat, barley, sugar beets, and colza/rape.

To see where Laon is on the map click here.

Across the street from the Laon train station the funicular Poma takes you up to the Upper Town, i.e. the old town, right by City Hall. As noted above, a guided tour of the cathedral is highly recommended since it will give access to the towers and the basements. (My guide for this visit, Rose Condette, was excellent.) Guided touring can also include other parts of the Upper Town, including a precious little Templar church and a museum.

American travelers are rarely seen or heard in Laon. In a typical year, according to tourist officials, only about 200 American stop by the tourist office, which occupies the 12th-century hospital building (Hôtel Dieu) next door to the cathedral. So be sure to stop in to let them know that it isn’t only the English, the Dutch, the Belgiums, and the Germans who appreciate their town and their cathedral. Inquire there if interested in visiting the WWI battle sites and museums in the surrounding area, particularly along the Chemin de Dames.

Official tourist office site for Laon and surroundings: http://www.tourisme-paysdelaon.com/.

- Text and photos by GLK

Agrandir le plan 

I hadn’t heard of the area myself until the local association Aubois de Terres et de Feux invited me to have a look at their heritage sites. That heritage is mainly industrial, particularly the ruins and remnants of 19th-century ironworks in what is now an agricultural region for growing colza and grain and raising Charolais cattle.

As you can imagine from the above description, I came across no breathtaking beauty, no culinary wonders, no picturesque villages or local festivities here.

Oh, I learned a lot over the course of a day-long visit— how iron ore from the mineral-rich soil in the valley was mined and transformed to produce increasingly refined iron thanks to the evolution of furnaces in the 18th and 19th century—but would a traveler venture this way to see the ruins of smelting plants and foundries like this?

High furnace of La Guerche. Photo GLK

Or this?

Ruins of the foundry at Torteron. Photo GLK

Would a traveler wander off course from Burgundy to the east or from the royal chateaux to the west to investigate other signs of 19th-century industry, such as this canal-bridge of the 1830s?

Canal-Bridge of Le Guétin crossing the Allier River. Photo GLK

Would a traveler, faced with the knowledge that in the latter half of the 19th-century the iron industry was extinguished due to lack of local coke (coal) for higher-temperature furnaces, depletion of mines, and competition from the larger mines of Lorraine (northeast France), be interested to know that one of the old iron plants has been replaced with a factory making tiles for historical monuments?

I doubt it.

Yet one of the most fascinating aspects of going well off the beaten track in France is catching glimpses of the dedication, stubbornness, vision, and perhaps folly of local individuals trying to preserve something that time and economics have clearly given up on, something of no great beauty that could fall or fade into oblivion without doing any visible harm.

Local associations with this passionate, curious, and/or learned members, the mayors of villages and small towns helping to put or keep their municipality on the map and create a few jobs in the process, the individuals who actually own some of these sites, and their constant and collective search for local, regional, national, and European funding: those are the elements of that the peculiar notion of French heritage.

Among them are the dedicated members of the association Aubois de Terres et de Feux.

There’s also Jacques Chevau, who decided long ago that he wanted to own a castle and in 1998 bought the dilapidated Chateau de Grossouvre.

Jacques Chevau pointing out a detail at Grossouvre. Photo GLK

Grossouvre combines a 12th-century tour with elements of a 14th-century fortress and 19th-century pleasure palace owned by the Marquis Aguado who once hosted Napoleon III and Rossini and other notables of the middle of the century. That was a time when the iron industry flourished in Val d’Aubois. The town of Grossouvre itself is home to a didactic museum concerning the iron industry in the area.

But iron isn’t Mr. Chevau’s concern as much as stone. The eclectic heritage represented by this castle is undoubtedly of limited significance in the vast landscape of manors, palaces, and castles throughout France. Nevertheless, pride in ownership and achievement in its stone-by-stone renewal and repair have now made local and national heritage inseparable from Mr. Chevau’s own. Some day, says Mr. Chevau, the castle will house and display to the public his extensive private collection of old arms and uniforms.

Different approach, different finances, different setting, same distinctly French relation to old stones, there are Monsieur and Madame Mangeot, seen below standing by the ruins on their property of the Abbey of Fontmorigny, which they purchased in 1987. (My apologies to Mr. Mangeot for clicking while his eyes were shut, but I only had one shot before running to catch the train.)

M. and Mme. Mongeot and dog by the Abbey de Fontmorigny. Photo GLK

 “We didn’t pay a lot,” says Mr. Mangeot, who earned his bankroll as an executive in the pharmaceutical industry, “but the cost isn’t in the purchase price.”

Fontmorigny was originally built by the Benedictine order but joined the Cistercian fold in 1149. Its remnants date from the 12th through 18th centuries, and in the 19th century housed workers from the nearby ironworks at Torteron (see ruins above). Mr. Mangeot calls Fortmorigny “a crossroads of the monastic world and the world of industry”—now there’s a proprietor with a sense of heritage!

Given that nature had taken full position of their ruins by the time they bought it, local, regional, or national government were not about to put money in the project to get it going, but the Mangeots have managed to combine their finances, professionally honed business savvy, and personal passion to get the ball rolling so as to rehabilitate in contemporary terms a piece of French heritage and to open it to the public. Occasional classical music concerns are held here, and a portion of the complex is now being turned into a B&B. See http://www.abbayedefontmorigny.com/ for details.

Owning heritage, restoring or reviving it in one way or another, and opening it, at times, to the public, is a particularly French kind of noblesse oblige, whatever one’s birthright. Visiting the Val d’Aubois might require too much of a detour to discover that here. Indeed the traveler finds it in all forms in France—wine, cuisine, chateaux, mills, churches… foundries.

How to meet the dedicated, stubborn, vision, perhaps foolish individuals who would be so passionate about such things? First of all, think of them as heritage rather than things. Then go into a local café or restaurant and ask, “Who owns that ruin up the road?” It might start of a great adventure.
Travel tips: From a visitor’s point of view the Aubois Valley is do-it-yourself territory. Aubois de Terres et de Feux is the best place to begin your research.

However the obscure the area may sounds, we are indeed in the Loire Valley here, albeit far removed from the zone promoted as the Valley of the Kings. Though not a wine-growing area, this area can be situated in Loire wine terms as being 20-40 miles south of Sancerre and Pouilly (Pouilly-Fumé). Most visitors exploring the Loire Valley by bike focus their pedaling on the zone between Saumur and Blois. Nevertheless, the extensive marked cycling routes of the cross-regional Loire à Vélo (Cycling Loire) project will soon reach so far as Val d’Aubois. See http://www.cycling-loire.com/ for more.

- Gary Lee Kraut

The tale of her life (1819-1884) and of the men she frequented speaks volumes of the history and culture of all of Europe at the time—from Russia to Paris, from Portugal to London, from Algeria to Silesia—while the presence of her bathtub in a corner of an overlooked and dimly lit shop in Paris’s 17th arrondissement offers a curious glimpse at the afterlife of objects of excessive and luxury.

Bathtub of La Paiva in the shop of Nicolas Beboutoff. Photo GLK, 2010.

Despite her fame, relatively little is known about the woman who came to be known as La Païva Born Esther Lachmann to Polish Jewish refugees in Moscow, the future marquise was first married at age 17 to a French tailor in the Russian capital. But the working-class life was not for Esther; she left behind her husband and son to come to Paris, where she took Thérèse as her first name.

Young, elegant, intelligent, and determined, Thérèse soon charmed Henri Herz, a wealthy pianist who introduced her to musicians and writers and a taste for a life of luxury. Her ambitions as a demimonde led to London, where British lords continued to treat her well. But Paris was where the real action was. She returned to the French capital where, Henri having hit hard times, she soon married a Portuguese nobleman known as the Marquis de Païva.

The newly minted Marquise de Païva, better known as simply La Païva, had now hit the big time. She took the best of the marquis, i.e. his name and his bank account, and pushed the rest, i.e. the man himself, out the door, while remaining married. Her rise follows that of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, president from 1848 to 1851 then emperor Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, though without the fall since she’d encounter greater fortune in the 1870s.

In 1871, she had the marriage to the marquis annulled (he shot himself the following year) and immediately remarried, this time to Prussian Count Henckel von Donnersmark. France may have been defeated by the Prussians in 1871, but La Païva still had the body and mind of a conqueror. The count was 11 years her junior and a cousin to Bismark.

Now countess, though forever remembered as La Païva, she ordered the construction of a mansion on the Champs-Elysées. That mansion, at #25, is one of the few remaining jewels of the avenue. Passersby often miss that landmark building, however, because it’s set back from the more recent buildings on the avenue that have replaced the other mansions that once lined the avenue. It has belonged to The Travellers Club of Paris since 1904, so only members and their guests get to see the interior. Since 2008 its ground floor extension to the street houses a trendy glam restaurant naturally called La Païva.

While that mansion was under construction La Païva ordered the decoration of the Chateau de Pontchartrain, 22 miles west of Paris, which the count had given her. The onyx bathtub was ordered for that chateau. The marble comes from an ancient Roman quarry that had recently been reopened in Algeria, then a French colony. It’s said that La Païva took milk baths in the tub, perhaps Champagne baths as well, but it’s doubtful that she got much use of it.

Her Prussian connections certainly increased her fortune—the yellow Donnersmarck diamonds she wore are legendary—but the couple’s contacts within the upper reaches of French government were increasingly strained in the years following the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Some say that she and her husband were accused of spying for the Prussians and eventually invited to leave France. Whatever the reason, they did leave Paris after several years and settled in the counts castles in Silesia, where she died in 1884.

The bathtub now belongs to Nicolas Beboutoff, who was born to a Russian ballerina in Monaco in 1944, was once musician in a balalaika band, and for some time now has specialized in the restoration of pre-1920 plumbing.

How did Mr. Beboutoff come to own the heavy tub and to put it on display among his 19th-century and early 20th-century finds in his shop?

For that curious and distinctly 20th-century European tale you need to stop by his shop at 29-31 rue des Dames in the Batignolles Quarter of Paris’s 17th arrondissement. Best to call first to make an appointment: 01 43 87 88 00. Yes, the tub is for sale. At this writing Mr. Beboutoff is asking 150,000 euros, excluding tax and shipping. See www.sbrparis.com for more about his work.

- GLK

Flag of Savoy atop the Castle of the Dukes, Chambery. Photo GLK

This is the flag of Savoy, not to be confused with the flag of neighboring Switzerland, which presents a white cross on a red banner.

Savoy (Savoie in French) rubs shoulders with Switzerland and Italy, south of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman in French) east of the Rhone River and north of Grenoble. Its main valley towns are Annecy, at the top of Lake Annecy, Aix-les-Bains, on the side of Lake Bourget, and Chambéry. Up in the mountains there’s Chamonix (and Mont Blanc), Megève,Tignes, Val d’Isère, Méribel, Courchevel, Les Arcs, and other ski resorts.

The photo above was taken from the top of the Castle of the Dukes of Savoy in Chambéry, the seat of power of Savoy from the 13th to 16th centuries.

Savoy was a county in the 11th century, and Chambéry became its capital beginning in the 13th century. The counts’ wealth and power grew through the region, thanks in part to their ability to assert control over the mountain passes between what are now France and Italy.

In the 15th century, Savoy was raised in status to that of a duchy given that it beginning in 1416 the region was ruled by Duke Amédée VII, who then annexed Piedmont on the Italian side of the Alps. Over the next 100+ years Chambéry developed in sophistication and beauty as the capital of a vast region embracing both sides of the Alps.

The French kings, however, coveted that position and wealth, and incursions by the French army led the dukes to transfer their capital to Turin, where various alliances eventually created the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. From dukes then the House of Savoy bred kings. A fascinating cross-Savoy exploration can be made by visiting both Chambéry and Turin, now 2-½ hours apart by high-speed train.

The French influence (language, culture, commerce, army) on the western side of Savoy had long been felt, so in the 19th century, as the nations of Europe agglomerated their various regions and relatives into centralized states better suited to fight each other, French Savoy naturally and willingly became a part of France. That was 1860, when Piedmont’s transalpine possession, Savoy and Nice, were ceded to France in exchange for French assistance in solidification of power of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, which required kicking the Austrians out of central and northern Italy. That move that soon led to the unification of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel… of the House of Savoy.

The traditional burial place of the House of Savoy since 1139 has been the Abbey of Hautecombe, on the edge of Lake Bourget, opposite the town of Aix-les-Bains. That explains why Umberto II (1904-1983), the last king of Italy (1944-1946), is buried in France along with many of his ancestors.

Abbey of Hautecombe, burial place of the House of Savoy, as seen from Bourget Lake. Photo GLK.

Savoy is now split between the department of Savoie in its southern portion, with Chambéry as capital, and the department of Haute-Savoie in its northern portion, with Annecy as its capital. Both departments are within the Rhones-Alpes region.

Here are several official tourist information websites for Savoy
Savoy, both Savoie and Haute-Savoie: www.savoie-mont-blanc.com
Chambéry: www.chambery-tourisme.com
Aix-les-Bains: www.aixlesbains.com/english/index.html
Annecy: www.lac-annecy/gb/index.html
Also see Turin (Italy): www.turismotorino.org/index.aspx

Fabien Nègre has opinions about restaurants the way some guys have opinions about football players. Ask him about a new restaurant and he’ll tell you, “Don’t even think about that one, all hype” or “Love the food, hate the guy” or “Not bad, but people are only talking about it because he’s friend’s with so-and-so,” or “He’s a friend of mine but you can do better than that,” or “Come over and try a new rum I just got.”

Ask him for suggestions for a restaurant for, say, two American couples coming to Paris to celebrate their anniversary, and he’ll say, “What do they want to spend per person, 500 euros? 600? At 800 I got just the thing for you, unforgettable.”

Fabien writes portraits of great chefs. He writes (in French) with a psycho-philo-gastro-humano-literary approach that gets to the heart of what that makes a top chef unique. That makes his work a bugger to translate, as this one of Chef Guy Martin on France Revisited. Many of his portraits are published on the site www.LesRestos.com.

When Fabien Nègre calls you at midnight, you pick up the phone to find that he’s already started the conversation. If you were to try to walk across Fabien Nègre’s mind at that moment you’d be hit by a stray thought in less than ten seconds. But if you were to share a table with him in a restaurant for two or three hours you would have a terrific, well-fed ride on the back roads of French thought.

More about Fabien at his site www.paysagesculinaires.com.

- GLK

Tomb of Dom Perignon, Hautvillers. Photo GLK

This is the tombstone of Dom Petrus (Pierre) Pérignon  in the abbey church of Hautvillers in France’s Champagne-Ardenne region. Hautvillers, located 4½ miles from Epernay, overlooks a wide sweep of vineyards along the slopes of the Mountain of Reims in the heart of the Champagne-producing region.

As cellar master at the Benedictine Abbey of Hautvillers, Dom Pérignon (1639-1715) was instrumental in development of the clear, bubbly, cork-popping Champagne as we know it today. He didn’t “invent” Champagne, since mastery of the double-fermented sparkling wine drew also from the expertise and experimentation of other cellar masters at the time, but his name comes to the forefront of developments in all facets of developing the Champagne method of producing quality sparkling wine.

It’s now difficult to dissociate the monk Dom Pérignon from the trademark of the same name that belongs to Moët & Chandon and is used for a high-end Champagne. But we’re talking here of the man, not the brand. Pérignon is entombed beside another monk-cum-trademark Dom Ruinart.

Though vines had been thriving in the Champagne region since Roman times, mastering the natural effervescence of local wines and developing the world’s most evocative sparkling began in the second half of the 17th century, thanks in part to curiosity and efforts of Dom Pérignon.

Since the abbey required peasants within their zone to tithe (i.e. to contibute a tenth part of their harvest), Hautvillers had the advantage and the challenge of producing wine from different grape varieties grown in different soils. Dom Pérignon learned to select the best of these and to blend them.

He was also part of a movement:
- to clarify the wine, which required a cleaner and quicker pressing process so that black grapes would produce a white juice (and hence wine) without their skin bleeding into the color of the juice;
- to understand, encourage, and control the double-fermentation that turns still wine into bubbly;
- to develop bottles and particularly stoppers (eventually cork) that would withstand the pressure of sparking wine;
- to promote the qualities and benefits of the sparkling wine of Champagne.

Because of Dom Pérignon’s instrumental role in the development of Champagne, Hautvillers calls itself Le berceau du Champagne, “The Cradle of Champagne.” Click on the link below to see where Hauvillers is on the map.
Agrandir le plan 

For more on tasting and understanding Champagne, see “A Champagne Diary.”

For more about Hautvillers click here.

Note: There is an oft-repeated falsehood that Dom Pérignon and Louis XIV were born and died the same day. It isn’t true.