A Bigger Bopper
May 9-13
Before heading to Ireland for two weeks we rounded out the adventure with our friends Kathy and Grant with two days in St. Malo and two days in Chantilly. Once again we were returning to scenes of previous trips.
St Malo because it is such an unusual city and Chantilly because of its chateau and proximity to Charles de Gaulle Airport. St. Malo is a medieval walled city once ruled by pirates as an independent country. It was mistakenly nearly destroyed by Allied bombing during WWII and rebuilt by its residents, stone by stone, from 1948-1968.
The word chantilly probably is best known in the United States because of the song, Chantilly Lace, by J.P. Richardson, aka The Big Bopper. Beginning in the 1600s, they really did make lace in Chantilly, France, and during the 19th century, every fashionable lady had to have either a black or white Chantilly lace shawl. Chantilly also gave its name to a fancy version of whipped cream. When I first visited the chateau in Chantilly back in 1980, I was blown away. I raved about the chateau for a good three or four minutes to my companions before they informed me that what I was looking at was the horse stable - not the chateau. We all got a good laugh! Apparently one of its former royal owners loved horses and believed that he was going to be reincarnated as a horse. He just wanted a nice place to be rode. On the right is a photograph of the stables.
The last "Big Bopper" of the Chantilly Chateau, Henri Eugène Philippe Louis d'Orléans, Duke of Aumale, bequeathed to the Institute of France his Chantilly estate, including the Château de Chantilly, with all the art-collection he had collected there, to become a museum. Below is the Chateau at dusk.
