Touring Saumur: Visiting the Loire Valley’s Home of the Cadre Noir Equestrian School with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The
château at Saumur is lovely. There are
two sparkling wine houses in town that do informative tours with wine tastings:
Gratien et Meyer and Ackermann.
The
world-famous Cadre Noir Equestrian School has its headquarters in Saumur and
the Decorative Arts Museum at the château has an extensive collection of
objects from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
But,
Saumur was also a stronghold of Protestantism, so it is still somewhat
downplayed as a tourism venue despite having nice hotels, recreational areas,
and high-quality merchandise to buy.
The
Protestants of Saumur vied with Louis XIII (1601 – 1643) for power. Louis XIII had Saumur’s protective walls
razed in retaliation in 1623.
The
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV (1638 – 1715) caused
many French Protestants (Huguenots) to emigrate to England, Berlin, and even
the southern United States (Charleston, South Carolina was the main port of entry.)
Today
tourists visit Saumur for the Crémant de Loire tours and tastings as well as
for the exhibitions of the Cadre Noir Equestrian School.
We
did not have a lot of time to visit on this outing to Saumur. We had to make a choice between the Calvary
Museum, Armour Museum, and the Decorative Arts Museum.
We
chose to visit the château first and climbed to the very top for a view of the
sinuous Loire River, the gardens around the château, the forests, the off-white
houses with slate roofs, and people going in and out of shops with packages of
wine, charcuterie, bread, and pastries.
I
thought of Honoré de Balzac’s heroine Eugénie Gramdet, who lived in Saumur, and
imagined her stocking up her provincial townhouse with jams and jellies along with
rillettes for winter while she saved money to send to her cousin in Paris. In the end, I think both she and her cousin got
a pretty good deal.
We
visited the Decorative Arts Museum, which has a ton of great items, if you like
dishes and dining room centerpieces.
As
I walked through the museum, I thought to myself, “How much stuff does France
have squirreled away in the provinces?”
Each
little town in France seems to have its own collection of decorative arts in a
townhouse museum or château it seems.
Perhaps
this is because decorative arts are easier to move than paintings and sculptures
in times of war, domestic revolutions, rioting, and foreign occupations.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
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