We bribed Bec with return visits to many of our favourite chateaux in the Loire Valley for the lead up to her big birthday. We hadn't bargained that in the last weeks of June we might fight just for air space by spending time there. We hadn't expected that one of our favourites, Chenonceau, where in past decades we have parked right up at the moat bridge (sat on it even!) would be blocked off, barred, and ticketed, kilometres back now, taking advantage of unprecedented mass of visitors at this time of the year.
When Diane de Poitiers, was granted this pretty chocolate box chateaux by her lover, Henry 11, she invited their friends to visit. A lovely place to welcome their favoured guests. Only later when Henry died, his wife, Catherine de Medici, so cripplingly jealous of Diane, finally had her expelled from Chenonceau and compensated with Chaumont-sur-Loire about five kilometres down the road. Catherine moved in and threw vast parties, shooting fireworks up from the long gallery she'd had built over Diana's bridge.
This day that we visited, four thousand others from all over the world, were there with us. Utter madness. Chenonceau is one of the most visited chateaus in the Loire. Dozens of tour buses disgorged ogling bodies who occupied every inch of available physical space indoors. Outdoors, the so-called Medici and du Poitiers gardens, fared little better. Wait till July and August, we were told by one of the officials at the gate, there are more than six thousand visitors a day here then. So, woe to Chenonceau. The future does not look good.
Almost impossible for either Diana or Catherine to have invited enough guests in their lifetime to do the damage to Chenonceau that we, in our bus and car loads, do now, in just a single day. The tragedy is we can see it happening before our very eyes: the old hand-painted tiles beneath our feet are wearing away to nothingness, swept by the staff as dust into the Loire at the end of a dreary working day. The soft chalky walls behind the roped and balustraded stairs are just as quickly disintegrating, mostly from accidentally brushing against them with knuckles as we all hold the rope leading up stairs. And so we reap damage and destruction. No wonder we pay through the nose at the gate.
Though, I read somewhere that this chateau is now privately owned. Still, someone is making so much money from these mass daily entrance fees that they must figure it is worth allowing any sort of damage daily. Pretty sad, Chenonceau.
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