Chapter 3 #3
She turned onto the A10 freeway and followed the signs.
The GPS told her where to go, and in a short time she was in the countryside.
There were cows and farms and she was enjoying it.
She was surprised when she noticed she had been driving for three hours.
She had passed a church that she recognized.
She and Malcolm had had a picnic there on one of their romantic trips.
They had visited the Tours Cathedral on one of their driving trips, and in the course of the day, she drove on past the chateaux de Chambord, Blois, and Chenonceau, all of which she and Malcolm had been to and enjoyed.
She stopped and bought a sandwich and a bottle of water at a gas station, kept driving, and at three that afternoon, saw a sign that said she was fifty kilometers from Biarritz.
She was almost there and had been driving for six hours.
It took another forty-five minutes to get to Biarritz.
She smiled when she saw the H?tel du Palais.
She recognized it immediately. It was an enormous palace on the Atlantic Coast, and she noticed that there were surfers in the water in wetsuits.
The beach was wide, the ocean was beautiful, and there were few people on the beach at that time of the year, only the surfers and people with their dogs.
It made her want to take her shoes off and walk in the sand.
It hadn’t been a hard drive and she loved where she had landed.
She loved the grandeur of Napoleon and Empress Eugénie’s summer palace.
It was a pretty little town of twenty-five thousand people.
The palace had been built in 1855, and Biarritz was twenty miles from the Spanish border in the Pyrénées.
The town itself looked somewhat luxurious with fancy shops and many restaurants, and had a slightly old-fashioned, historical feeling to it.
She’d seen on the internet that the beach was five miles long, and that there were tall cliffs, several museums, and two very popular casinos.
It was a perfect resort town, as Napoleon and Empress Eugénie had decided too.
Sabrina couldn’t help thinking that she would have loved to see it when Napoleon’s court was there nearly two hundred years before, with all the carriages pulling up to it, with grand people arriving for a ball at night.
Now it was just a pretty beach town with a fabulous hotel.
She decided that it was worth staying there for a night, just to see it.
She wondered what the suites were like. Biarritz had been in and out of fashion for the past two hundred years, and was somewhere in between now.
Not nearly as elegant or in fashion as the south of France, the C?te d’Azur, but it had an undeniable grandeur with the H?tel du Palais dominating the scene.
Sabrina googled it from her phone and smiled as she read about it. She knew Malcolm would have loved it, and she wished they had discovered it together. But now the memory of it would belong only to her.
Google informed her that Biarritz had six beaches and many parks. There was also an Imperial Chapel built for Empress Eugénie, and Sabrina was eager to see if it had beautiful frescoes and murals, which were her passion.
Sabrina drove to the hotel, asked at the front desk if there was a suite available, and they said there was, and she checked in.
She went to get her bag from her car, sent the car to the garage, and went to claim her room.
She couldn’t wait to see it. When the bellboy who accompanied her opened the door for her, the sweeping view of the ocean took her breath away.
The sun was setting by then, and there was a red glow in the sky.
It was a magical setting, which combined natural beauty and man-made grandeur on a huge scale.
The suite they had given her was elegant and old-fashioned.
She felt a million miles from anything familiar, which was exactly what she had wanted.
Everything she knew or loved had been broken and disappeared, and she had wanted to see something new and different.
Biarritz fit that description. Nothing about it was familiar.
She stood staring at the ocean from her windows, and saw the surfers coming in for the night. They looked like seals in their black wetsuits, carrying their boards.
She decided not to order room service that night, and decided to explore.
She didn’t want a meal in the hotel’s fancy dining room.
She preferred to walk and find a little bistro, which she did, and had a delicious bowl of bouillabaisse made from local fish.
She sat at a small table and no one bothered her.
She normally didn’t like eating alone in restaurants, and never did, but the town felt safe, and the waiters at the restaurant were nice and respectful. The whole town had a good feeling.
She walked past the casinos after dinner, but had no desire to enter.
Neither she nor Malcolm were gamblers, and she suspected that the crowd there would be flashy.
She was enjoying strolling around the town, and she stopped when she saw a realtor’s office tucked between two buildings, a restaurant and a small hotel, and she carefully looked at the photographs in the window.
There were two or three very large chateaux for sale that had no appeal for her.
There were many like them for sale in France, cold and drafty, cumbersome and expensive to run, and usually in need of extensive repairs.
There were photographs of several villas too.
They were pretty and on a more human scale but nothing out of the ordinary, just summer homes for bankers or dentists or accountants looking for houses in the area.
But the photograph that caught her eye was of a house that looked like a chateau in a fairy tale.
It had turrets and balconies, a graceful roof, and beautiful gardens around it.
It was smaller than the other chateaux, but very distinctive-looking.
It made Sabrina smile when she saw it. It was just outside a town called Arcangues, five miles from Biarritz.
There was another house listed there too, more of a cottage, painted white with bright blue shutters.
The little chateau looked unusual, elegant, and a little eccentric.
Whimsical was the word it evoked as she looked at the photograph.
It was bigger than she’d want, but it appealed to her.
It made her want to check out the little town five miles away.
The chateau she liked was the Chateau de Bonport, and in English below it someone had written the translation, Chateau of Safe Harbor.
She wondered if it was still for sale, and for how much.
The photograph looked old. She put the realtor’s number in her phone and walked away.
It was just a crazy idea, and she forgot about it as she walked back to the hotel.
She’d had a nice evening in the town. Biarritz had a good feeling, and was a wonderful contrast to Paris.
It made her feel very adventuresome, having come alone.
—
She remembered Arcangues again and the chateau when she got back to the hotel and looked it up on her laptop.
Arcangues was a town built in the twelfth century, so seven hundred years older than Biarritz, less than five miles away, with three thousand inhabitants.
It was described as pretty and peaceful, built around the local church.
It had been rebuilt in modern times using original materials from the time it had been built.
All of the homes and cottages had blue shutters of a distinctive blue referred to as Arcangues Blue.
It was a bright teal with a hint of turquoise to it, unusual and beautiful.
There was an inn, a school, and a castle nearby.
The church had been built in the sixteenth century, and there was a lovely cemetery where all the headstones were round.
Everything about the town looked and sounded quaint and charming, and she decided to go and see it the next day.
It looked as though it would definitely be worth the trip.
It intrigued her that the bright distinctive blue of the shutters and timbers had been granted as a “right and privilege” to the Marquis of Arcangues in the twentieth century to be used exclusively in Arcangues. She wanted to see it.
Sabrina opened the windows before she fell asleep.
She could smell the sea air and hear the ocean outside her windows.
She could imagine what it must have been like when Napoleon’s court was in residence there in the summer.
It would have been a fascinating time to be alive.
It was the first time she had ever slept in a palace, and for the first time in seven months, she slept like a child.