French Road Trip
Heading back north now, I wanted to linger in the countryside a bit before it began to be urbanized.
I had about 390 miles to go to my next hotel, and planned to make a whole day of it by taking a couple of detours. My host in Sarlat, M. Toulemon, had written out a detailed list of suggestions for me just between there and the main autoroute. He did recommend a tiny village called Collonges-la-Rouge, which I’d read about and had decided to skip as a probable tourist trap. On his advice I added it back in, in addition to my own idea of going to the home of George Sand, the French novelist and ardent feminist. I have always enjoyed visiting author’s homes, and hers was in the countryside on the way to Bourges, our next stop.
I was happy to have one last chance to wind around the hills of Périgord and Corrèze, and enjoy the way the villages look nestled or perched amongst them. As in most of France, any turn can open out on a little turreted château or farmstead, unsung in a guidebook, just people’s homes or civic buildings. 
The villages change color as the local stone underneath the hills changes color. Sarlat was yellow-orange, down the road the villages were grey, and then we got to Collonges, whose castle makes our featured photo. It is the only spot in all the region where the stone is this color. The castle is old, 1400s, and the man who lives in it lets you go around some of the rooms.
The little town itself is, or was, (because it isn’t really a viable town), indeed just a tourist trap. Nothing important is to be found nearby. But just the same, some medieval people farmed the hills, and grouped together for safety where there was a reliable well, and brought their harvests in to a covered marketplace, and let the men in the castle defend against any marauders from the south. I don’t think there were many, frankly.
I enjoyed ignoring the dozens of ice cream, candy and postcard shops, and standing and looking at the little marketplace and the village well, and trying to imagine being a person there 600 years ago, only knowing the people who lived there, hoping to fall in love with one of them and have a healthy life. Today, a weekday in April, there were plenty of people there by mid-morning.
And actually, I did not totally ignore the shops, because outside one, a display of postcards caught my eye, with a rendering of a Knight of Malta, or Knight Hospitalier as they were sometimes called. I took a picture of it, and just as I finished, a middle-aged woman dashed out of the shop saying, in French “You cannot take pictures of the postcards Madame! The sign here says that!” Sure enough, amongst several bossy signs there was a camera with the circle-slash on it. I said, in French “Oh! I’m quite sorry. I didn’t see it.” I had already put back the card. I turned and saw a young woman looking bemused, and I made a fake scared face and said “C’est interdit!” and she smiled. And so here he is, just for you, after all that trouble. Presumably we are to believe these guys passed through this town, to see if anybody wanted to give them some money to put into the account of their loved one who was in the Holy Land, crusading away. Just another part of the Pope’s banking network.
People do live here, at least part time, to run all these shops and restaurants, but they must drive in here late at night to preserve the atmosphere. Yes, every building in the whole village is this color.
Next we got on the autoroute, and I got to go up to 84 mph in places, which felt insanely fast. We had a lot of ground to cover, so Skoda the Nag had a lot of clanging to do whenever I exceeded the speed limit by 5 kph. It constantly changes, and magically she knows exactly when. Klang, klang, klang. But I obeyed, because two weeks after I got home from my last French road trip, I received two speeding tickets in the mail, with a fancy French government seal on them.
As we got back toward the center of the country, I took an exit and headed over flat, fertile farmland to a hamlet called Nohant-Vic, which is where George Sand’s house is. This was a name she gave herself after becoming an author, and her birth name is too long for me to memorize.
We are back up in the Berry region, all flat pastures and fields. Sand inherited the estate from her grandmother, who raised her there after her father died and her mother did… nobody ever did say, even on Wikipedia. And voilà, Ms. Sand had a troubled relationship with her own daughter, and was called a lesbian more than once.
Anyway, her grandmother somehow bought the place after the French Revolution, even though she was the illegitimate daughter of a baron, I think, and Ms. Sand raised her children there with a series of (male) lovers after she left her husband and got a lawyer friend to help her win in the divorce. Our tour guide was very excited about this accomplishment, for in those days the woman never, ever got custody of her children if she chose to leave her husband. I sense some gaping holes in the whole story, but I suppose that is normal.
I’ve only read one of her books, years ago, called Lélia, and I seem to recall it was okay. I should maybe try another. After touring the house, and enjoying the passion of our tour guide for George Sand’s life, I was left with the niggling impression that she was just a self-indulgent person who was convinced her opinions were interesting to everyone, and who had some decent skill with words. My worst nightmare of myself.
Also, I took no pictures of the interiors, because grand as some were, they were in a dismal state of preservation, and it frankly felt a bit nightmarish in there. Even Ms. Sand only stayed there in the summers. Why 18th century French nobility made homes of stone, with high ceilings and tiny fireplaces, and then could not heat them, I do not know. It is a continuing issue.
However, the gardens were nice, and said to be in essentially the same design as Ms. Sand had left them. She had a rose garden and an apple orchard, with local varieties that they have replanted. That’s the good life.
