What I did on my Holiday - Part 6 - Chambord

We left the Farm House early on Friday hoping to break up the journey home a little with a stop at the Royal Palace in Chambord, Near to Blois on the way back, It is 2 hours from Châtellerault to Chambord and we booked a hotel at Evreux which was a further 2 hours north so we could break up the drive into more manageable chunks. The Palace itself is set in a vast parklands where if you are a fan of Walking or Cycling I imagine you could spend weeks and not find the need to traverse the same paths more than once. However we didn’t have weeks so headed straight for the castle, Tickets were 9€ 50 for an Adult and we joined the large queue to buy the ticket from the little kiosk that is at the main entrance to the castle grounds. We then walked around the outside of the building to find the main entrance (Where we discovered two cash desks with no waiting at all selling tickets.) The Palace itself is designed around the same scheme as a traditional castle although as with most of the Château in the Loire valley more attention was given to decoration than to defence however the Palace does have a main keep surrounded by turreted walls. In the Keep there is the Château’s most famous feature a double Helix staircase, this consists of two spiral staircases that were intertwined so that as you walked down through the staircase you can see people on the other staircase and yet you never meet them.

As well as the various rooms which have been preserved to give you an idea of the “relative” luxury that the French Kings lived in (And also how short they all were.) there was a very interesting exhibit on the Art in the Second World War, basically when invasion looked imminent the Department of Arts in Paris set up plans to move the most important works of Art into hiding, including the Mona Lisa, Chambord was one of the sites chosen. Personally I would have buried them under a small shack rather than place them into a 90 roomed palace as I would have thought that a giant palace would be the first place you would look for valuable art, but that’s just me.
Anyway it was interesting the role that this French Civil Service took in protecting these works of art, even having double agents working for the Germans keeping track of where they were taken, credit also has to be given to Chambord for not trying to hide the fact that after surrendering to the Germans the French Government handed over the works of arts created or owned by Jewish, or deemed unsuitable, in return for being left with the rest in their control. I have been to several exhibitions in France about the Second World War and think this is the first that in anyway acknowledged that there was a collaboration with Nazi Germany, I should point out that I do not necessarily blame the Vichy Government for collaboration with the Germans as they had very little alternative with France falling and continuing the war from North Africa likely to incur massive retribution on their citizens, however it is important that the decisions made in history are not hidden from scrutiny where they may then be made again. Anyway after looking around we entered the massive gift shop where we bought a sample of the Chambord Liquor before heading off to our Hotel in Normandy.