Fontainebleau and Chartres

If you're following along and wonder what happened to yesterday's blog, keep reading.  I thought about apologizing, but in case you haven't noticed, we're all about spontaneity, and we had it in spades yesterday.

Our first stop was at Fontainebleau, one of the major historical chateaus of French royalty, including Napoleon I.  The first view of it is directly into the very recognizable curved perron, the steps that lead up to the traditional grand entrance.  Maybe this gives a hint as to the origin of the architectural term "welcoming arms."
 





















Like many historical royal dwellings, it has a rich history, dating back to Louis VII, 1137.  Its last use as a royal dwelling was with Emperor Napoleon III in the 1860s.  Touring the building you get a glimpse into most of those eras.  For example, Napoleon I's throne room:

And you may live in a home or know someone whose home has a gallery of family portraits.  So does Fontainebleau.  Here's one:

I would like to have the library.  It was originally a corridor, but Napoleon wanted a library, so he had the corridor converted:

Every home needs its own chapel, don't you think?

One could be forgiven for thinking the chateau is all about Napoleon I, but one of its earliest inhabitants was James I.  This room is dedicated to him:

One can only absorb so much sumptuousness at one time.  As an aperitif, so to speak, we decided to avoid the traffic jam that is the outer beltway around Paris, where our GPS wanted to take us, and instead swing to the southwest and have a quick look at the cathedral of Chartres.  Ha!  You can tell by that concept that we had never been there.  To start with, the lay of the land is such that as you approach Chartres from the direction of Paris, you see it from 12 km (about 7 miles) away:

You know from that moment that this is not going to be a normal Gothic cathedral.  After parking at the nearest parking garage and hiking a few block to the hilltop, you are greeted with this look:

From the outside it's dominating.  From the inside it's breathtaking.  The choir and apse have been cleaned recently, so they give an idea of what they must have looked like new.

Chartres is famous for its magnificent labyrinth, with eleven rings in a 13 meter diameter circle.  Sadly, the nave was prepared for an organ concert, so the labyrinth wasn't fully exposed, but here's a glimpse of the center aisle portion of it:

In case you don't want to do the math yourself, a full walk through the labyrinth runs a length of about 2 1/2 football fields.  The cathedral is on the St. James of Compostela pilgrimage, so I think if I ever decided to make that pilgrimage (unlikely) I'd start here, do the labyrinth and then head out for the 1625 km to Compostela Spain.  And if the indoor labyrinth were covered like it was yesterday, I'd go out to the bishop's back yard and try the one there (not exactly a labyrinth, but could be used like one.)

So to complete the foreshadowing from the first paragraph, I must explain the spontaneity remark.  When we entered the cathedral, I spotted a flyer for an organ recital to be held at 9:00 pm.  "Do the math, Daryl", I told myself.  An hour or so for a recital, followed by an hour and a half back to Louviers, are you sure you want to do that?  And then I saw this:

Decision made, we finished ogling the cathedral, had dinner, came back for a fantastic hour of music from this grand instrument (played by their 24-year old assistant organist), and headed back to Louviers with an ETA of about midnight.  But our GPS didn't know about a certain construction project that blocked one of the major roads we needed to get home.  And we lost track of the "detour" signs at one of the roundabouts.  We had quite a time of it, coaxing a new route out of our GPS and finally getting in bed only an hour later than expected.  And that's why you didn't get a blog yesterday.  Maybe we'll have better luck tomorrow, when I'll be wrapping up the Abbe Prévost tour as well as our current blog.