You can’t talk about the deep heart of France without mentioning its volcanoes. They’ve made frequent appearances in this blog, in stories about Blaise Pascal’s groundbreaking experiments on barometric pressure done at the top of the Puy de Dome, the grinding challenge of the mountain stages of the Tour de France, or the medieval lava quarries at Volvic that gave so many landmark buildings in this region their characteristic gray-black color. The volcanoes dominate the skyline behind the Auvergne’s largest cities, and even though they are all dormant (for now) their superheated internal plumbing feeds the hot springs that have brought tourists here since the first humans inhabited the area.
The Manoir de Veygoux: Humble beginnings for one of Napoleon’s greatest generals
If you’ve followed this blog, you know I have a longstanding fascination with people who come from difficult beginnings in remote parts of the country and somehow forge a national reputation and a lasting place in history. It’s not that I follow the “great man” school of historic thought – I don’t! – but many of these people just have personal stories that are so compelling they are worth knowing about. Joan of Arc is certainly a prominent example in French history; in this space, I’ve written about Lafayette (hero of both the American and French Revolutions), about Pope Clement VI (a monk from the remote abbey at La Chaise-Dieu), and about the Count of Montmorin (Louix XVI’s “right-hand man”), […]
Visit Limeuil – it’s officially one of the “Most Beautiful Villages” in France
I’m not even halfway up the steep principal street and already I’m gasping for air as I approach the center of Limeuil. Fortunately, there are plaques telling the story of the village’s history every few yards, so it’s easy enough to stop and read one to mask my lack of physical fitness. I can’t remember an approach to a town’s center this physically demanding since my visits to the great fortress at Beynac, or the upper reaches of the castle keep at Commarque. But already I can tell that this town is worth the effort. There are two very good reasons they ask all visitors to park at the bottom of this steep hill. The first is practical: Limeuil is […]
In the Aubrac: What It Means to Feel “At Home” in the Deep Heart of France
Cet article est consacré à mon ami Luc-Emmanuel (qui m’a convaincu de reprendre ce travail en tant que blogeur et qui m’a posé la question à la base de cette réflexion) et à Karen (ma chere epouse qui tolere mes marottes et qui est ma partenaire dans cette aventure.) Is there someplace in the world (other than your actual home) that feels like home to you? Someplace that is instantly comfortable – a relative’s house, a specific beach, some small town or a sprawling city — where you can imagine spending significant chunks of the time remaining to you on this planet? Since I started this blog six years ago, people have regularly asked me “What is it about France […]
Blaise Pascal’s 400th birthday party is underway in the deep heart of France
It’s official: Clermont-Ferrand has just launched its year-long celebration of the 400th anniversary of the birth of Blaise Pascal, “le génie Clermontois.” The party started earlier this month with a performance of music from Pascal’s lifetime in the lovely church of Notre Dame du Port. Over the next 12 months, the celebration continues with: Exhibits at the Henri-Lecoq museum of science and natural history and the Roger-Quilliot museum of art An online collection of documents at the Overnia (Clermont’s digital library of historical materials) about the great man’s life, as well as reproductions of his most famous books and essays A year-long series of concerts, films, lectures and roundtables featuring distinguished artists and scholars celebrating Pascal’s life and the lasting […]
Reflections on the Ruined Castle at Montmorin
Somehow my visit to the crumbling castle ruins at Montmorin feels more important to me than the site itself really warrants. From the peak of this ancient little volcano, you can see forever – or at least that’s how it seems to me on a particular August afternoon in the deep heart of France. The entire Chaine des Puys, that iconic 25-mile-long range of extinct volcanoes that dominates the country’s center, is visible along the horizon to the west. As it happens so often in my travels through this region, I feel like the only person left on earth after some global cataclysm. I’ve come to visit the Chateau de Montmorin, a jumble of ruins at the end of a […]
VALENCE: France’s “Gateway to the South” has a big-city feel
I’m not a jaded traveler – but neither am I easily surprised. Valence did it, though, more than most of the places I’ve visited in France in the past year. It’s a lovely small city that feels much larger and more urban than I expected. It’s sophisticated for its size – one of its leading families put the city on the map as one of the great destinations for gourmet dining in France! And with one foot in the Midi and the other in the deep heart of the country, it’s ideally positioned to be your base for exploring a part of France you might never see otherwise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIqAy4oN1KQ Some of Valence’s sophistication is easily explained: this is […]
Délicieux – a good story about good food set in the deep heart of France
OK, it’s not actually a true story – but the 2021 film Délicieux is a good story (“93% fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes), and for the purposes of this blog it’s a perfect story because it unfolds in the Cantal, one of the most beautiful regions in the deep heart of France. Directed by Eric Besnard, the comedy is available now to stream on Amazon Prime and YouTube Movies. In the movie, Grégory Gadebois plays Manceron, an extraordinary, if sometimes temperamental, chef who gets dismissed from his position cooking for a French duke. What did he do wrong? For a banquet with the duke’s distinguished guests, he made a dish (one of 40!) that includes potatoes at a time when the […]
Visit Commarque – an incredible ruined castle with prehistoric roots
Since 2016, I’ve written more than 160 posts exploring the exceptional places I’ve seen in the deep heart of France, so I don’t say this lightly: the Château de Commarque is unique among the most moving experiences I’ve had traveling in this region. I’ve taken hundreds of detours down country roads and visited dozens of other old castles over the last 25 years; by my count, I’ve written about 34 of them just for this blog. But after a while, many of them start to look similar – they are piles of rocks where the outlines of a castle remain, perhaps, or slightly shopworn old family manors. Don’t misunderstand — just about every château is interesting in some way. But […]
Saint-Nectaire is not just about that world-famous cheese
My first impressions of Saint-Nectaire formed during a freezing, dark winter week I spent there several years ago – and those impressions weren’t necessarily all positive. For obvious reasons: the place is remote, 50 minutes southwest of Clermont-Ferrand, and the town relies heavily on summer tourism. We were there for a series of meetings with my company’s business partners, and by the time our day had finished everything except our hotel’s restaurant and a single pizza place was closed, and none of the other local attractions was available to visit. Last summer, though, I finally saw Saint-Nectaire as it is meant to be seen – and this time around I was charmed. The shops and tourist sites […]
Hérisson is high on the list of “Villages Preferred by the French”
To be fair, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I came to Hérisson last summer. For a few months I had seen clips in the French press ranking the town on the list of “villages préférés des Français.” But France is among the best in the world at creating labels to promote tourism in towns of every size in every region of the country. There’s the official list of “Most Beautiful Villages,” for example, but there’s also a designation for “Small Cities of Character”, “Cities of Flowers,” and so on. So what might I find in Hérisson? Would it be a place ready to receive thousands of tourists, like so many towns in France where the medieval charm is […]
Building a new “medieval” castle at Guédelon
Before I went to Guédelon, I’d never really heard much about “experimental archeology.” For me, archeology seemed more a discipline based on pre-existing evidence – concrete objects, things you find in the ground or at the bottom of the sea. The interpretation of those objects is often open to conjecture (is this pottery shard part of a wine jar or was it a piece of the sculpture of some deity?), but in most cases you couldn’t really devise an experiment to prove the theory one way or the other. As on so many subjects, though, I was wrong. There’s a whole formal branch of archeology devoted to testing our conjectures about how people lived and how they made things by […]