Touring Saumur - 1 - with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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

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Touring Saumur (France) - 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Touring Saumur (France): Visiting the Cadre Noir Equestrian Museum by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

My husband Laurent and I ran home from work to go on a long weekend trip to the Loire Valley town of Saumur.  I cannot think of any drive that qualifies as so much landscape eye candy as this drive through the Loire Valley.

The cave homes along the Loire Valley charmed me as usual.  I wanted to own one of those “troglodyte” homes with their window boxes full of red geraniums cascading down in front of them.

“You can rent one for a vacation.  I do not want to own one.  They have spiders and centipedes in them,” Laurent said.

The romance of permanent air-conditioning and perfect temperature for storing wine wore off with the centipede remark.

The cave housing led us into downtown Saumur where we met Laurent’s friend from the air force when they had to do mandatory military duty in France.  (This mandatory military service has been disbanded now.)   We ate dinner that night in a restaurant called La Serre (The Green House) at the Hôtel Roi René.

Roi René was the King of Anjou from 1409 to 1480.  He was beloved by his subjects.  We drank an excellent, sparkling wine with our meal that gave us a touring idea for the next day.

We went to bed full and happy.  The next day we went on a tour at Gratien and Meyer, which produces a champagne-like wine that tastes like Asti Spumante from the Piedmont region in northern Italy that produces the red wine Barolo.

After the tour, we drank excellent Angevin wines with our meal.  Our cocktail was the sweet wine from Anjou called Quarts-de-Chaume.  The wine tastes similar to Sauternes, but it is much more difficult to find in the US than Sauternes.

For our starter dish, Laurent and I ate a seafood platter with Savennières wine.

Our main dish was roast leg of lamb that we drank with a Saumur Rouge.  For dessert, we had the French upside-down cake called Tarte Tatin followed by a strong espresso coffee.

After this meal, we visited the Angers château and the equestrian museum.  Saumur is famous for its Cadre Noir equestrian team. 

Saumur was once a Protestant stronghold, but the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 caused mass migration to regions with more religious tolerance: England, the Netherlands, Berlin, and South Carolina in the United States.

The Decorative Arts Museum interested me the most with its collection of enamelware from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  There was also a luminous French porcelain collection from the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

The Equestrian Museum has displays about equestrian culture from all periods and cultures.  Horses have never interested me too much, so I probably missed much of the significance of the items on display.

I did understand that horses were like the tanks of their day.  The only people who could ride the horses were aristocrats and royalty.

Suggested Reading:

- National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

-- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

- Le Cadre Noir de Saumur by Guillaume Henry and Alain Laurious

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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