In retrospect, the carbo-loading may have been overkill. We were cutting an equilateral triangle through the French countryside, eighteen kilometers on each leg, for a total of just over 30 miles. I had toast, oatmeal, and cereal for breakfast, topped off with a croissant for good measure. Much to our dismay, there were no tandem bikes of the ilk displayed prominently on the tourism board’s promotional brochure, so we made our way on mountain bikes. But I was skeptical of even that; road bikes, in perfectly good shape, were renting for a couple Euros cheaper.
For the record: I was wrong. We started on smooth asphalt as we left the city but quickly shifted over to narrow country roads hemmed in by agricultural fields for tilling. An eighteen-wheeler scuttled us off the path to deliver, what we later learned, was a massive shipment of dirt. After our first eighteen kilometers, we arrived at Chambord, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the grandest of the Loire Valley chateaus.
Inside, the marble floors glistened like floor polish, stained glass windows cast colorful arcing quadrilaterals on the tiles, each tiny square magnified to the point of nonrecognition. There was an entire room of mounted deer heads so ancient that only the skeletons remained. But somehow, even without the eyes and the fur, they looked more real than their taxidermy counterparts, like the facsimile of a face tries so hard to mimic reality that it undermines its ever having existed.
“Do you know why this place is so popular?” Courtney asked. I looked out at the throngs of people bunched into sitting rooms and peeking out from within the double helix staircase. “Everyone wants to imagine themselves as royalty.” Who wouldn’t dream of private gardens, being entertained nightly by comedians and playwrights, feasting on a bottomless glut of deer meat? There was something romantic about pretending to be nobility living during the French Renaissance—like a Medieval version of Cribs—without for a moment imagining the actual kings and queens we were emulating.
By all accounts, they were more than likely terrible people. And yet, we know so little about the historical figures who staged their lives at Chambord compared to the politicians of today, themselves incapable of having their every misdeed documented and exposed. It would seem, however, that simply knowing more about a vile character isn’t enough to dissuade people from wanting to emulate him. It’s like that deer head, like no amount of dressing up can disguise that which he so nakedly is. It hardly mattered that the moat around the base of the castle had algae growing up the stone sides, or that the draw bridges had wooden gangplanks that led to underground slave quarters. There will always be people who will insist: wasn’t having the moat enough?
It was another eighteen kilometers to Château de Cheverny and a last eighteen back home, all of which felt longer because of the gravely farm roads—prickly with dry grass and punctuated with grain silos draped in creeping thyme—that doubled-backed on themselves to avoid the main highway arteries. Alone on the trail and attempting to make the best of a bad situation, Courtney and I sang Disney songs. Even now, it’s hard to explain. Maybe it was the clapboard houses that looked straight out of Beauty and the Beast or the leaves that brushed by us like colors in the wind, but we didn’t stop belting out tunes until we’d made it all the way back. We sang to brave reflections, to whole new worlds, wishing for the arrival of new kings to oust those we hadn’t yet known we’d lost.