After a busy couple of days of fleeing from Indi in London, she had to make her way back to university. Her semester hadn’t ended yet, some ‘intensive program’ still awaited, but I was finished, and by God, I didn’t feel like paying 200 Euro to fly back to Belgium. Some nosing around online and I found flights to La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic Coast, on sale at exactly one tenth the price! That’s less than my train ride from downtown London to the airport…

The long summer day made my late arrival feel early. Even though I only reached the city at ten in the evening, all its streets and squares were packed, both locals and tourists, some still drinking spritzes or gin and tonics, others already at the tail end of their lobsters and sea bass. I hid in the shadows with my meagre sandwich, bought two hours earlier in an English convenience store, and called Indi to feel less lonely in the mass of happy, dancing people.

The next day, racing through the Roman town of Saintes, past Angouleme (home to simultaneously the most beautiful and most overlooked cathedral in France) towards my destination of Poitiers, I kept calling friends and family, driving away the loneliness brought on by Indi’s absence, and telling everyone about the stylishness of the French. People not only dressed better, they also looked markedly healthier and happier. And that despite the forty degree heat.

Always happy to play the contrarian, Indi countered my observation, stating that she loved the fashionable freedom of London, where you don’t have to wear elegant dresses or classic shirts. Instead, people display a colourful mix of styles; punk, goth, or retro, others preferring streetwear, or something more chic. Of course the classical outfits I was seeing in France were still very much on the menu in certain areas of London. She made a good point.

Searching for arguments, I brought up the unique Angevin architecture of Poitiers, at which she hung up the phone. So instead I called my historian Sister, freshly graduated with stellar grades, and told her about the crumbling remains of a Roman theatre, about the Romanesque carvings of the churches, and about the Grand Hall of Eleonora of Aquitaine. And there she took over the conversation.

Eleonora spent fifteen years unhappily married to the King of France. In that decade and a half, she only bore two daughters. One after the Pope implored the couple not to give up on marital life yet and offered up a bed he claimed to have made himself for the job, and the second after the bishop of Paris attempted something similar. Sick of her overtly religious husband, Eleonora argued that she had failed to produce any male heirs, and at the end of his wits, the Pope finally agreed to annul the marital bond.

Not even two months later Eleonora married the King of England, the wedding swiftly followed by a son. During the next fourteen years, she would raise a further seven children, three of them future Kings of England. From her position as Queen of England and Duchess of much of Western France, she spent many years waging war against her ex-husband in Paris. 

Decades later, and already seventy years old, Eleonora suddenly had to bail out her son Richard the Lionheart. On his way back from crusade, a rival potentate had captured Richard, and the task of raising 100.000 gold coins fell on his mother’s shoulders. Not granted any rest yet, she crossed the Pyrenees Mountains five years later, to go and get her youngest daughter. Blanche had agreed to marry the French King (already the grandson of Eleonora’s ex-husband) to ensure lasting peace between both realms. The couple married happily, produced many healthy kids, among them the next king in Paris. This made Eleonora grandmother to both the English and French thrones. Only at the ripe old age of eighty did she finally pass, having accomplished and lived through more than most!

There my Sister strangely hung up the phone, leaving me with the aftertaste of her impressive story. Perhaps she found herself similarly busy. The next morning I made my way to Tours, whose historical centre looks quasi unchanged from the days of Eleonora’s dynasty. Fantastic carvings decorate the wooden frames of the houses, bringing dragons and demons to the parties that the handsome and happy French were organising in the sun-lit streets. 

My final stop was Lille, right across the Belgian border. Only added to the French domain in 1659, this city had once been the capital of Flanders. Sun King Louis XIV didn’t just pillage and conquer to the North, he similarly nibbled off bits of Germany, Italy, and Spain, growing France in all directions. I was glad to have finally made my way here, where I instantly felt at home. The streets and their homes resemble Brussels and Antwerp, although without the buzz of the former, and without the great Scheldt River of the latter.

After three days of living by the dictates of my mental stopwatch and rushing through France from the Atlantic almost to the North Sea, I wished I could do it all again. Thank God the summer has only just begun!