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The Atlantic Coast of France Off the Beaten Track I KNOW THE SOUR SIDE OF THE FRENCH, the Parisian waiters who denigrate my Charleston -accented French! How delightful then to discover that off the beaten track there are happy, smiling, accepting French. The virtues of French culture were on display during a recent June visit to the Atlantic coastal region. I delighted in the family gatherings: grandparents, grown children, and babies enjoying their beautiful land. I thrilled at a verdant, agricultural countryside of vineyards, wheat fields edged in poppies, and pastures full of white, grazing cows. I melted at the gastronomy of fresh raspberries, delicate omelets, sautéed mushrooms, sole meuniere, and lush desserts. I thrilled at the lilting language that floats and sings. I discovered that I could still sing “Sur le Pont” and mime “Monsieur le Corbet” from my early years at Charleston Day School and Ashley Hall. One of the high points of our visit was Versailles and Hotel Le Grand Trianon. Set in the sumptuous gardens Le Nôtre built for the Sun King, Louis XIV, Le Grand Trianon is a vibrant jewel. A Sunday afternoon stroll in the Versailles gardens, with its vast array of gushing fountains is a marvelous experience. We then ventured to the Château de Chantilly to see the stunning Condé art collection assembled by Duke Aumale. The garden by André Le Nôtre has majestic formal water gardens reflecting the venerable chateau. There was also a 600-foot-long stable that could house 240 horses. The former owner who built the stable is said to have believed in reincarnation. He must have expected not only to come back as a horse, but as a horse at Chantilly. Our Hotel Le Grand Trianon at Versailles was an amazingly convenient location for visiting Paris, combining our love for the Paris area while enjoying the country life of chateaux and their objets d’art and gardens. We left Paris for Normandy, the D-Day beaches, and Port en Bassin. We stayed at the Hotel Mercure, whose golf course overlooks the Omaha Beach landing area. That night I walked the golf course, built on these old killing fields, and marveled that our troops made it up the steep hillsides of Omaha Beach. We stopped at the nearby garden of Domain du Plantbessin. An always welcoming Collette and Hubert Sainte-Beuve were excited for us to see their extraordinary garden adjacent to their nursery. With twelve garden “rooms,” they had the perfect space to show off clematis, wisteria, alliums, lilacs, and water lilies. Collette had black earth under every fingernail and was gritty. Hubert described her: “like everyone from 76 French Classical Elegance Brittany, an artichoke, a bit prickly.” He was tall and fashionable with a silk scarf. When I asked her if he helped out, she smiled and said, “Yes, he will feed the fish.” We were greatly impressed with Château de Balleroy, also in Normandy, built by the French architect François Mansart (1598–1666), and later purchased by Malcolm Forbes of the Forbes publishing empire. Forbes, a pilot, had been in the World War II Overlord assault. He came back in the 1970s to purchase this chateau. We toured the chateau and garden, enjoying a house that is still lived in by the Forbes family on vacations. The house has the intimate feel of personal collections including balloon memorabilia, highly polished silver on tables, paintings by Albert Balleroy, letters and photographs from Lyndon Johnson, and pictures with Nancy and Ronald Reagan. Yellow climbing roses cling to the walls of the garden. We left Normandy for the coast of Brittany and Dinard in the midst of a fourday French holiday. We found the last hotel room, truly wonderful, in Dinard at Grand Hotel Barriere. I could have stayed there for the month. We bicycled along the Route de la Mer. I swam in the hotel’s wonderful open-air swimming pool. The vista of St. Malo over the bay was blue and full of sailboats. Children were building sand castles while adults sunbathed. Sometimes chance intervenes in our lives, and we take an unexpected yet productive direction. So it was with our stay at Les Brises Hotel, on the old port of La Rochelle, its harbor dotted with sailboats and kayaks. One morning we ventured to nearby Lucon to see the town garden. We were admiring the vast Gothic cathedral when Father Pierre Chatry offered to give us a tour. When I...

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