At Aixe, we crossed the Vienne River, which gives its name to the region, and continued southwesterly via the village of les Cars to Châlus. It was here, in 1199, that Richard the Lionheart - king of England and all of western France - was hit by a crossbow bolt. The wound became infected, and with the onset of gangrene, Richard called for his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of two kings and mother of two more, to come to his side. Knowing that death was nigh, he pardoned Pierre Basile, the archer who shot the fatal bolt. But as soon as he died, Richard's men found Basile, skinned him alive, and hung him. So much for royal mercy. Today there is little activity at the castle, its gardens abandoned, as seemed to be an old Rolls-Royce that sat between some outlying buildings. The Châlus dungeon tower is forbidding and indeed would seem impregnable to the military forces of 800 years ago.
Seeking something a bit less grim to contemplate, we headed east again to La Rochel'Abeille, where the Moulin de la Gorce has become a splendid hotel with a one-star Michelin restaurant. Located alongside the mill pond in a verdant park, the hotel has only ten rooms, assuring outstanding personal service for its guests. Part of the exclusive Relais et Châteaux network, the Moulin is worlds away from the huge international hotel chains, giving us yet another reason to avoid main roads, main attractions, and above all, preorganized travel. If you stay in cities and are dependent on train stations, airports, and timetables, you're not likely to find small hotels as charming and agreeable as the ones we stayed in, plus the many we bypassed but would cheerfully try another time.
To get the best results for a planned but unstructured trip like ours, you need good maps, because French road-sign posting is abysmally bad. We like Michelin maps for their clarity, but there are several excellent publishers, including the Institut Géographique National series showing every detail and contour of the terrain. You also need guidebooks, and there are numerous excellent choices, some for hikers, backpackers, and bicycle tourists, some for sybarites. We prefer Michelin's green guidebooks, most of which are available in English in your hometown bookstore.
We experienced the gentle humanity of the French countryside in Saint-Yrieix. Having spent too much time photographing the Pluriel in its multifarious guises, we missed the official lunch hour. For Americans, used to buying fast food whenever it might be desired, the rigorous rigidity of French feeding is a surprise. Restaurants are open from noon, but service usually starts only at 12:30, and should you arrive much after 1:30, you may not be seated. By 2:15, when we stopped for lunch, all the customers were gone, the serving staff had taken off, and we despaired. Not to worry. Madame offered bread and cheese and beer, and she charged a pittance for the food and coffee, all with a smile. For everyone who has been hassled and rudely treated in Paris, rural France comes as a welcome surprise, just as heartland America delights foreigners who have been impersonally insulted in New York City.
One of the highlights of our excursion was discovering Jumilhac-le-Grand, a village neither of us had ever heard of, and which is not even mentioned in the Michelin red guide to hotels and restaurants. Jumilhac's feudal château is a masterpiece of late Middle Ages architecture. The original thirteenth-century structure had a "face-lift" in the sixteenth century, with the addition of new pointed roofs with distinctive black ridge tiles. Jumilhac is only eight miles from Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, a town I've passed through at least 200 times in the past forty years and which to this day I cannot pronounce. But neither can the locals. We asked three for the right pronunciation and got three different answers. Just eight miles down the D80 from Jumilhac, our wonderful trip ended in anguish. Not our emotional state, sad as we were to go back to the workaday world, but that's the literal translation of Angoisse, the last village before reaching the "big" road, D704, that took us home in opposite directions.