Travel: Chateaux and Silkworms - river cruise in France - Brief Article

European Waterways advertises its barge trip in the Loire Valley with an enchanting picture of the hotel barge Nymphea gliding under the graceful arches of the Chateau de Chenonceaux. It is reminiscent of the wonderful opening scene in The Lion in Winter, in which Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), released from prison for Christmas, is rowed ashore at Chinon and Henry II (Peter O'Toole) leaps into the river Loire to greet her.

Well, I'm here to tell you that there isn't enough water in much of the Loire to keep a canoe afloat, let alone a hotel barge, so the river we will be sailing in the Loire country is the river Cher. It was just two years ago that the Cher became navigable, when the government brought back into operation eight locks and spillways that had stopped functioning half a century before. Plans are to raise the water level further in the near future, but now just 20 miles of the Cher are navigable and the Nymphea, a small barge that carries only six passengers and draws only four feet of water, is the only pleasure boat of any sort on the river.

The cabins are tiny. My sister Jane and I have one small hanging closet and a drawer each under our bunks, but when Jane's drawer is out, mine is blocked. The accommodations are so tight that our luggage is taken ashore for storage and Michelle, the talented British cook, and Caroline, the entrancing French stewardess, both room ashore. This is adventure writ small.

Led by our captain and tour director, an insatiably curious, curly- haired Brit named Rupert who speaks fluent French, we visit a vineyard at Thesee where a brother and sister who own 30-odd hectares (about 75 acres) are deep in the harvest. When the wine has been bottled it will be stored in the limestone caves and galleries that were hollowed out of the hills of Touraine. From the 12th to the 17th century local miners quarried blocks of the creamy white limestone-tuffeau-to build first churches and town halls and later the chateaux that dot the Loire Valley. These caves, and the uses to which they are now put, prove as fascinating as the chateaux themselves.

This afternoon we sail from Montrichard, under whose looming ruined walls we anchored last night, through the low arches of a 4th-century Roman bridge to Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher. The sun is out. Trees lean gracefully over the towpath, the leaves of the alders turning silver in the brisk breeze. Like a Mississippi River pilot of old, Rupert knows his river-where to take a bend wide, where to hug the bank, where to gun the motor to push us over a sandbar. We bump once or twice, but nothing serious.

We moor, and Michelle and Rupert take us in a minibus to Saint-Aignan, an important pilgrimage site in the Middle Ages. One highlight is a marvelous Romanesque church, untouched by the destructive religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. Inside, the crypt where pilgrims gathered has rare and well-preserved 11th- and 12th-century frescoes. It is quiet, and moving.

Back on board, it is down to the saloon for another of Michelle's extraordinary meals, prepared in the tiny galley with seeming ease and great good nature. In charming accented English, Caroline explains where each bottle of wine comes from, what are the qualities that make it special, and what kind of grapes went into it, and then pours a few drops into my brother Jim's glass. He will be the official taster this evening. Dinner tonight starts with foie gras and confit de canard, followed by lamb chops with pommes dauphines, onion, and vegetables with just a hint of mint in them. Our eyes gleam at the sight of dessert: poire Helene, a baked pear with chocolate custard sauce. Afterward, it is back upstairs to the lounge for the after-dinner coffee and chocolates, and then very soon to bed, the lights in the lounge too dim to read or play cards by.

The following afternoon it is back to the cliffs and the stone galleries. In them we see how the champagne of the Loire Valley is made and stored, one million bottles maturing there in the cliffs. Lighted by miners' lamps, we tramp through gallery after gallery of a mushroom farm-gray, brown, white, and pink mushrooms-and are told that a certain variety of mushroom must be soundly whacked to start the germination process.

On the last day we visit a charming young man named Laurent in the town of Bourre who tells us that he was born a "troglodyte" but is one no longer. He laughs at our puzzled faces. Troglodytes, he explains, live in chambers hollowed out of the rock. Indeed, we have noticed smoke curling from chimneys protruding from hillsides, and plate-glass windows with lace curtains in the living walls of stone.

These days, Laurent owns a vineyard, raises chickens, and grows endives on the side. But what interests us most is his silkworm farm. The temperature in the caves, 12 Celsius, is perfect for raising silkworms. Once hatched they eat mulberry and ash leaves voraciously, and in a remarkably short time-three weeks -their original weight has multiplied a thousand times, and they start to weave their cocoons. Just before the butterflies emerge, the cocoons are plunged in boiling water. Laurent picks one end of a silk thread from a cocoon, fastens it to a rotary frame, and starts to unravel it. A single cocoon will yield two kilometers of thread. When Pope John Paul II visited Tours in 1997 he was presented with a chasuble woven entirely from silk raised in the area.