Chantilly day 2

Pierrefonds’ castle: view from the sky

Happy sunny Tuesday everyone! It’s such a pleasure to wake up and immediately hear birds singing, open the shutters of the bedroom and see trees becoming green again and then getting the first rays of the sun! You get it: it’s going to be a good day 😉

As promised here is the second part of our Easter trip in France: Chantilly and around to be a little more precise. As we were staying in the dependency of a lovely house we had breakfast with out host and we asked her for tips about less known but great places to visit. She asked immediately if we knew about the castle of Pierrefonds. To be honest it was totally unknown to us but a brief chat gave us the desire to drive to there. When you enter the village through a lovely small street you start to face that stone giant: impressive! It was difficult to take a great pictures from there with the sun in front of me but this will give you an idea 🙂

The castle was first a military castle but was destroyed and until mid 19th century it was left as a « romantic ruin ». It was there that a banquet was given for the wedding of the first king of Belgium. A few years later Napoleon III asked Viollet-le-Duc to undertake its restoration. Before it looked like that:

The castle in 1855

And now:

To be honest this is masterpiece even if some specialists are claiming (and they are probably right) that Viollet-le-Duc let his imagination go very far in his restoration. There are sculpture everywhere on the walls; so many details that you could spend days examining all of them but with kids it’s impossible to spend too much time as they are quickly losing interest and start running everywhere! Where the castle of Chantilly has thousands of luxury objects this one is almost empty and the reason is pretty simple: Viollet-le-Duc died before everything was done and the followers ran out of money. Useless to say that this castle is now used in many movies!

We then walked a little in this lovely village, ate sandwiches and went to Senlis that was also recommended to us as a great city of the Middle Ages. Let’s be honest: the town is nice, some places are interesting to see but it was completely EMPTY! Almost no one there so we had the impression to walk in a dead city. It’s very sad as the tourism office has a lot of documentation available with recommended paths but the atmosphere was so sad we decided to leave quickly. Last negative comment: there was a local place to visit with astonishing reviews on Internet. It’s called « Le Cachot ». We arrived 5 minutes before the opening but it remained closed; we came back after a small walk and it was still closed 😦 A neighbor told us that the owner was a little further having a chat but despite her help we were not able to find him. Too bad!

Finally we drove back to Chantilly, having a good drink and then we selected a less known but very good restaurant: L’Essentiel near the train station. During the week-end there are local musicians and singers so it always brings a different atmosphere to the place. A special mention to the delicious food with a special kudo for the Moroccan dessert!

Get ready for day 3: Paris but for now I leave you with my usual gallery of heels! I wanted these pictures to be full of sun so this time many colors and no specific trend. Happy viewing and read you soon 😉

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