France holds a special place in my heart. It was the first place I visited overseas, on a class trip in high school.¹ That trip we started in Paris, traveling down to Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, then across to Nice and Monaco before returning to Paris and flying home. I’ve been back to Paris a number of times, but never for that long, always as a tourist, and always with people who had never been before; while it’s always easy to fall in love with the city I found myself revisiting the same places: the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Eiffel Tower.²

I’ve been trying to get back for some time. I had a trip booked in April of 2020, then again in early 2021 and yet again in late 2021. This is the first trip that stuck, for a larp at a château a few hours south of Paris. I didn’t really know what to expect, returning on my own after so long. I decided to drive around the countryside and see more than Paris, like I did the first time I was here.

I’m happy to report that France has been unexpectedly lovely and charming. The French have a reputation for being irascible (if not downright hostile) to tourists, especially if you don’t speak the language. I’ve never found that to be particularly true but it wasn’t entirely unfair, either. I felt a little of that the first time I visited.³ This time I haven’t felt that way at all. Maybe I’m better at seeming hapless and apologetic, maybe it’s the weather turning warm again, maybe everyone’s just happy to have tourists back. But I’ve been here for nearly a month and I’ve felt largely welcome everywhere. And after several months away from Europe, it’s good to be back.

I landed in Paris and spent a few days in the city recovering from the flights⁴ and adjusting to the jetlag. This was the first time I’ve been to Paris where I wasn’t overtly being a tourist — no art museums, no Eiffel Tower, just relaxing and walking around the city a bit. I had some errands to run⁵ but it was also a chance to decompress from my time in Latin America.

It was kind of a revelation. In many ways it was the rhythm I liked the most about living in New York City, the ability to kind of slink out of my residence mid-morning and grab a late breakfast or an early lunch before hopping the subway and getting some chores out of the way in the afternoon, then returning home for a few hours before going out for dinner.

It was kind of ideal. I’d get some work done in the morning and some more in the afternoon, I’d get to see friends for lunch or hang out late after dinner or turn in early and watch some television.⁶ It felt livable, in other words, which was never really a sense that I got before. It doesn’t surprise me to find that out about Paris, it’s just that I hadn’t wrapped my head around how that would work in practice. And now I know.

I did make a point of seeing a few things, which this trip turned out to lean heavily into taxidermy.⁷ I saw the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature — a hunting museum with a lot of specimens and rooms focused on different sorts of prey — and the Musée Fragonard,⁸ a veterinary museum filled with what would have been called “curiosities,” including some rather startling flayed human figures preserved by Honoré Fragonard.⁹ But the one I was most fond of was Deyrolle. Deyrolle isn’t a museum per se, but a taxidermy shop. So it’s small, but filled with some of the most gorgeous specimens I’ve ever seen. Among the menagerie there are flamingos, peacocks, bears, ostriches, and deer, even a donkey and a tiger. There’s a lobster mounted in a case with each bit of shell disarticulated so you can see all the joints. There’s a crow hanging from a light fixture, wings outstretched in mid-flight. There’s butterflies pinned so they’re flying out of an exploding light bulb. There’s a bat skeleton hanging from a perch under a bell jar. And they lack that dead, wooden feel that so many taxidermy specimens seem plagued with. It was lively and joyful, which is something I never imagined I’d say about a taxidermy shop. I was glad to have found it.

Since I wanted to get out into the countryside, I rented a car. And because my life apparently lacks excitement and variety, I decided to rent an electric car. I’ve never driven one before. France is reportedly very good with the infrastructure to support them, so it seemed like a good time to see what it was like.

I ended up in a brand-new Hyundai Kona with only 6 km on the odometer.¹⁰ It doesn’t drive any differently than a gas-powered car does¹¹ although the lack of engine noise is a giveaway. I had already planned a meandering route — no more than a three hour drive between most overnight stops — and that suits an electric car just fine. You can generally drive for about four hours if it’s fully charged, so I didn’t have any serious range issues.

But that’s not to say I didn’t have any range issues. That’s still their biggest problem. If you’re low on fuel in a gas-powered car you can just fill up in five minutes and be on your way and a century of infrastructure means it’s rare that you’re more than a ten minute drive from a service station. In the electric car I rented, you need about 36 hours to charge to full from a standard outlet, and about five hours on most of the charging stations around the country.¹² So on a few of the longer drives, I found myself having to pull over for about 45 minutes to get enough charge to reach my destination. And you might think that’d be a great time to grab lunch, and it would be, except most of the fancy chargers are at rest stations along the highway, so you’re stuck eating rest stop food.

Still, there are glimmers of what it could be, and probably will be in about a decade. Most of the B&Bs I stayed at could easily snake an extension cord out the window so I could charge overnight. One had even installed a fast charger so I could go from empty to full over an afternoon. And many of the parking garages have spots with chargers; the one in Nantes had multiple chargers available for free for anyone parked there overnight.

At this point I’d have no qualms about buying a electric car for my personal use, if the vast majority of my trips were within a two-hour radius and I had a parking space where I could reliably charge it overnight. But the technology’s moving so fast this advice will be outdated within a year. There’s some challenges to overcome still.¹³ But it’s only a matter of time.

I had three goals driving around France this trip: food, castles, and wine. The food has been … I mean, it’s France. I had wanted to find a fantastic restaurant in Bordeaux with a vegetarian tasting menu¹⁴ but I gave up. Partially because I was alone, and these things are far more fun with other people. Partially because it’s hard to find a vegetable tasting menu; France is the first place I’ve been where fancy restaurants feel compelled to add a disclaimer that they cannot accommodate dietary requests, as opposed to a small notice that they can.¹⁵

And it’s a shame, because what I’m eating has been phenomenal. France shares with New York City a kind of reverence of food; it’s pricey, but it’s generally great everywhere. One of the things I miss about New York is knowing if I wander into just about any restaurant, no matter how sketchy it looks from the outside, it’ll be decent grub.¹⁶ And that’s fundamentally true in France as well.¹⁷

I got used to the routine eventually. Scan the daily menu before you sit down. Google everything you don’t recognize.¹⁸ Know you can always fall back on a crêperie or a pizza place if you must. And when you do find a place with a selection of vegetarian snacks and appetizers on the menu, like the swanky cocktail bar I found in Bordeaux,¹⁹ treasure it.

Castles were easier to find — I started off driving through the Loire Valley, which is ground zero for fancy French castles. The heart of that region is Amboise, and it’s such an unapologetically scenic little town I wished I had booked a couple extra days there. The Loire Valley was the seat of the French nobility for a long time — the English owned Paris through the 1400s — so a lot of fancy châteaux were built a short riding distance from one another. There’s almost two dozen within an hour’s drive.

There are a couple I found particularly great. The Château de Chenonceau is beautiful and charming, built across the River Cher and a gift to Diane de Poitiers from Henry II.²⁰ The other is the Château de Fontainebleau, which I caught on the drive back to Paris. Fontainebleau is undeniably more imposing and impressive, larger and more over-the-top in every sense. But Chenonceau actually feels elegant and human-scaled, significantly less likely to try and batter you to death with burnished sconces and gilded statuary. If I were Emperor I’d want to live in Fontainebleau. But I’ve got no desire to be the Emperor, so I prefer Chenonceau.

It’s the wine that’s the biggest revelation. I leaned in hard. My route took me through the Loire (known for Chenin Blanc and sparkling wine), down through Bordeaux, then after the larp back east through the Champagne Valley until I ended up driving through Nancy²¹ on the way to the Alsace Wine Route into Strasbourg.

My wine knowledge is pretty spotty. When I turned 21 I had started off mostly drinking wine, but during an extended stay in Germany I developed a taste for beer just as the microbrew revolution was taking hold in the United States, so I got distracted by saisons and witbiers and lambics until the cocktail craze took off and I started hanging out in speakeasies.²²

This whole trip has been a reminder of what I liked way back when. The wine caves in Reims where they show you how double fermentation works and the crazy machines they use in the modern day to rotate the champagne bottles. The tasting rooms looking out over the vineyards. The way people obsess about microclimates and terroir in a way that seems more excitable than exclusionary.

Riquewihr deserves a special mention. It’s one of a lot of villages you’ll find along the Alsace Wine Route. The town is tiny, barely a ten minute walk from one end to the other. It’s also incredibly touristy — the town was rich from the wine trade, so all the buildings are stone and survived for hundreds of years, making for a place which looks impossibly fake. It comes by it honestly, so I give it a pass.

The key is that it’s surrounded by vineyards, and lots of the local producers have tasting rooms in the town. I went into one and found the latest generation of the wine-making family running the store. And they asked how many glasses I’d like to try — we decided six, although they snuck a last one in for seven — and after a few questions about the kind of wines I liked they just started pulling bottles out of the back and pouring splashes of each to try. We started with a 10€ bottle of Pinot Blanc,²³ made our way through some Riesling and Pinot Gris, some from single vineyards or single varieties, and ended up with a golden syrupy glass of Gewürztraminer affected by noble rot (50€/bottle) followed by the special vintage of the same variety (150€/bottle) which tasted of sunshine and roses and mango and jasmine. And I probably could have talked myself into a bottle of at least the less expensive Gewürztraminer but I don’t check baggage and I couldn’t have finished that bottle — too rich, too mind-blowing — so I didn’t even try.

I booked this whole trip to France for Meeting of Monarchs. Meeting of Monarchs had been bumped twice because of the pandemic, and I was half expecting it to get bumped again. But it ran, earning the distinguished title of the first larp I’ve played since January of 2020. I got the sense something similar was true for a lot of people. It was a little emotional.

Meeting of Monarchs is a historical larp, based on the famous meeting in 1520 between Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The game wasn’t trying to do anything particularly innovative — no black box scenes or clever mechanics or flashbacks — just throw a bunch of high-strung characters in a small château for a weekend and wait for the fireworks.

A slightly overly small château, it turns out. The Field of the Cloth of Gold was renowned for the magnificent city of tents that was erected for the occasion²⁴ but the weather turned foul just as the larp was starting and between the cold, the wind, and the rain, most people ended up confined indoors. Our tournament field ended up consisting of a single lonely tent. There’s not much you can do about the weather, and to their credit there was enough space indoors to run the game, if just barely.²⁵ And things did clear by the final day, in enough time to run the archery competition.²⁶

I played Thomas Boleyn, Henry’s ambassador to France, one of the architects of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and most famously father to Mary and Anne Boleyn. Mary was the former mistress of both Francis and Henry, and Anne would eventually marry and later be beheaded by Henry.²⁷ In the fiction of the larp Thomas was also Henry’s spymaster.

Thomas Boleyn has a rather nasty reputation, recently reinforced by The Tudors and The Other Boleyn Girl. Most representations seem to be leaning rather heavily into the idea that he schemed his daughters into the beds of various kings, used them to advance his fortunes, then abandoned them to their fates to save himself. This is almost certainly not accurate. Thomas had worked his way into a valued position at court on his own merits before either of his daughters arrived there, and there’s more historical evidence that he opposed rather than encouraged his daughter’s affairs.

Still, there’s ample room for interpretation. I tried to split the difference. On the one hand I was ravenously scheming and ambitious. On the other, I was scrupulously honest and precise, providing genuinely good council to the king. I may have been overbearing and demanding of my daughters, but tried to leaven that by giving them choices and respecting their decisions.

My game was balanced between the political and the personal. I was trying to ensure the treaty between England and France was signed while defanging it of any politically dangerous clauses.²⁸ At the same time, I was trying to arrange my daughter Mary’s marriage to, well, anybody of sufficient rank who lived far away from the court while simultaneously trying to maneuver Anne into Henry’s path, close enough to be beguiling, not so close as to be annihilated. I was busy.

I think it worked. I mean, I had a lot of fun. Late in the game I got pulled into a privy council meeting where the other members informed me I needed to remove Anne from court immediately so that they could convince the king to start sleeping with his wife again.²⁹ I knew in the afterparty I had done reasonably well when someone came up to me and said they hadn’t said a word to me all game, but whenever they saw me sidle up to a courtier for a quick chat they knew they were committed to ensure whatever I was trying to do failed.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what distinguishes historical larps from other ones. I’m not sure there is much. Is there a significant difference between being really into Westworld or Hamlet and being really into Tudor history? You can obsess about costumes and have enthusiastic arguments about character motivations in both cases. If it’s not reenactment — and these deliberately aren’t reenactment³⁰ — then you’re not even bound by how things turned out.³¹

But the real thrill, as a history nerd in a historical game, is to actually be there. I had a conversation about ethics with Thomas More and a discussion about artifice and art with Leonardo da Vinci. I accused the Duke of Buckingham of treason.³² I had more than one argument with Thomas Wolsey about the finer points of the treaty and Papal succession and the likelihood any peace would survive the drying of the ink. And I got to discuss the legal and political ramifications of divorce with Henry VIII, and more than once got blisteringly dressed down by the king in what felt like an entirely historically accurate temper tantrum. Fans of Doctor Who will recognize the thrill of dropping in on the past and meeting luminaries. Players at historical larps get to actually do it.³³

As much as I loved the politics though, my favorite moment was a quiet, emotional one. I had wandered back into the château while the crowds were distracted by the archery tournament to find Mary Tudor, the king’s sister, alone in the library. Mary had recently been offered to Charles V as a possible bride, and was facing the prospect of being shipped off from court and separated from their true love.

So Mary Tudor and Thomas Boleyn had a bittersweet conversation about obligations, about being torn between what you desire and what your country demands. Mary cursed having to choose between fulfilling a duty to the king and following one’s heart. I reminded Mary that we are all bound up by circumstance, and most women never get the choice to marry an Emperor at all, let alone be in a position to regard it as the worse fate. Mary asked for my advice. I replied I had only political advice to offer, and they would not appreciate any of it. And so we sat, both trapped by Henry in our own way, until the doors opened and the court flooded back in.

I think just about everyone had an excellent game. There’s already a rerun scheduled, and if it sounds like your kind of thing I’d rush to sign up or get on the waitlist. The costumes were magnificent and the photographs, when they are released, are going to be stunning. It was a wonderful way to get back into larping after being away for so long.

I’m finishing this now on the outskirts of Paris, a short cab ride away from Charles de Gaulle airport. I had expected to get a few more days in Paris, but I snuck over the border into Germany for a couple days when I found out a Ukrainian friend of mine had managed to relocate to Heidelberg shortly after the war broke out.³⁴ So after all the driving over the past three weeks³⁵ I really needed to lock myself in my room and do nothing. So I did.

I had a bottle of wine from Bordeaux that I hadn’t managed to split with anybody left after my travels. I had found a tasting room in the center of the city run by a consortium of big-name winemakers in the region that would sell you some of their best wines for 3€ a half-glass, and tried one I loved so much I rushed across the street to a wine store and demanded a bottle that tasted like it.³⁶ I had hoped to split it with a friend after the larp, but ended up wandering around the afterparty with two bottles of sparkling wine from the Loire and never got the chance. And from then on there wasn’t really an opportunity. So I’m drinking it now, catching up on television shows and finishing off this massive entry for my blog. The wine tastes amazing, all the more so for surviving so long in the rental car.

France has been intense, and there’s so much more I want to see: Lyon, Toulouse, Burgundy, the Alps. And there are friends whose schedule didn’t sync up I’d like to make time for. I’m due back later this year, but I don’t know how much time I’ll have. Certainly not a month. It’s a luxury to be able to spend so much time exploring one place, and I’ll need to find at least a couple more months to see everything I want. I’ll have to see what I can do.

Next: Zagreb (ZAG) to London (LHR)
Prev: Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, 2022, Paris

Footnotes

¹ My fond recollection of the trip might have a lot to do with the fact that I was sixteen and ratio of girls to boys was four-to-one. But France was a big part of it, too.

² At this point I’ve been to the top of the Eiffel Tower more often than I’ve been to the top of the Empire State Building.

³ Admittedly, that could all have been annoyance at dealing with a dozen American teenagers on a school trip.

⁴ The flights weren’t the worst I’ve ever been on, although I didn’t sleep on the first one and between the both of them it was about 20 hours in the air, which is simply way too much.

⁵ Getting a phone card, renting a costume for the larp

⁶ For some weird reason, after nearly a year of shows I wasn’t interested in seeing, all these great series feel like they’ve come out all at once: Severance, Slow Horses, Picard, Peacemaker, Moon Knight, The Afterparty, The Ipcress File. And I’m late to Only Murders in the Building, but it’s great, particularly for a particular kind of New Yorker.

⁷ I’m still using Atlas Obscura for suggestions, which dabbles heavily in the macabre.

⁸ Not the Fragonard Musée du Parfum which I’m sure is nice but isn’t this one.

⁹ Honoré was dismissed as a madman from the school they taught at and, looking at a skinless man riding a skinless horse, you start to think the administrators might have had a point.

¹⁰ So new, in fact, that they had neglected to flip the switch to enable the fuse box in the car. Among other things that meant the remote unlock didn’t work. I fixed it after a couple hours on the road when the warning message popped up.

¹¹ Although if you can’t drive a stick shift renting an electric car in Europe is a great option, since they’re cheaper than the equivalent gas-powered versions — I assume there are subsidies — and don’t come in manual versions.

¹² There are a number of super-fast charging stations that can get you to full in about two hours. But if you’re stuck in a small town in rural France with a 70 km range left and the only super-fast charger within 70 km turns out to be for the old, outdated, incompatible standard which doesn’t fit your car, you get to kill an hour getting to the 150 km range which will get you to one of the super-fast chargers.

¹³ The fact that you need to leave your car there while it charges means there’s going to be serious contention for charging spots if the world switched over. Service stations would need to turn into parking lots. But the current uptake hasn’t made that an issue yet, as far as I can tell.

¹⁴ My main interest in visiting Bordeaux was to try Restaurant ONA, the first 100% vegan Michelin starred restaurant. It’s still closed due to COVID.

¹⁵ And, look, at this point I’ve eaten at $100+ dollar a plate restaurants in at least a dozen countries, including France, and in all of them they’ve been willing to accommodate vegetarians and vegans. France is largely behind the curve on this. That’s not a moral judgement. As a vegetarian I obviously believe the world’s a better place with more vegetarian options, but this just seems like France is out-of-step with the times.

¹⁶ Perversely, the dingier the place the better the food. Bad restaurants don’t survive for long, and if you’re not putting money into decor or cleaning you damn well better be putting that money into the food.

¹⁷ New York has cheaper options but less consistency and a greater variety of cuisines. France has less variety, but it’s one of the all time greats of world cuisine, so it’s kind of a push?

¹⁸ Imagine my delight to find a restaurant with “faux filet de bœuf” on the menu, then my disappointment to discover that’s what they call sirloin steak.

¹⁹ Symbiose. Well worth checking out.

²⁰ Diane was promptly evicted by Henry’s jealous wife, Catherine de Medici, upon Henry’s death.

²¹ Nancy was one of the centers of the Art Nouveau movement, so that aesthetic is woven into the architecture of the city in a way that I find deeply satisfying. And Nancy isn’t particularly big, but I honestly loved the vibe of the city. You can walk out into the streets and find cafés and restaurants and bars open and welcoming for as long as you’d care to wander. And the parks were in bloom with cherry trees and the sun was out and I almost, almost, checked some real estate prices. Just to see.

²² If nothing else, this should convince you I’ve been insufferable for a very long time.

²³ Apparently I like Pinot Blancs? I liked that one plenty enough.

²⁴ Neither side really trusted the other enough to let them host, so a more-or-less neutral ground was chosen in the Pale of Calais and everything was brought in for the occasion.

²⁵ Larps with a lot of secrets often benefit when everyone can eavesdrop on your business. Bigger drama.

²⁶ It was still too cold to host the closing banquet outside, and there sadly wasn’t enough room for all the players to fit in the same room together dinner. I’m sure subsequent runs will have better contingency plans, but the first and best plan remains to pray for warm weather.

²⁷ Although not before bearing a daughter who would become Elizabeth I.

²⁸ Famously, Henry’s lack of a legitimate male heir throws the whole question of succession into question. Half the nobles supported Henry’s bastard son, the other half supported Mary, Henry’s infant daughter with Catherine of Aragon. The treaty as written both specified Mary as Henry’s heir and promised Mary to Francis’ son in marriage when they came of age, which would have meant any children of theirs would have ended up on the throne of England and France.

The prospect of a French king sitting on the English throne was anathema to a lot of English nobles. And in about 35 years they’re not going to like it any better when Mary marries Philip II and it was a Spanish king on the throne. I spent a lot of my game trying to remove the clause.

²⁹ I pointed out I would hardly be able to do so if the king demanded Anne stay, and I would feel compelled by my service to the Crown to inform Henry of my plans and the reasoning beforehand. And it’s not like Anne was the problem with Henry in the first place. Henry had been demanding the attentions of the French ladies-in-waiting for most of the preceding day.

³⁰ Meeting of Monarchs made a very specific decision to favor drama over historical accuracy. They fiddled with a lot of details. Leonardo da Vinci was in the service of Francis I but died in 1519, Calais was still firmly in English hands, and Anne Boleyn would have been serving in the French court rather than the English one.

³¹ Meeting of Monarchs ended with about a half-dozen historically dubious secret betrothals and weddings, as larps are wont to do.

³² I was right, too.

³³ And can I just take a moment to applaud all my coplayers at this event? Not a single person I talked to felt like they were terribly out-of-place. Everyone did their research, or at least enough of it to be convincing. You could argue the finer points of Lutheran doctrine or the succession of the Holy Roman Emperor if you wanted, or just gossip about the legitimacy of the Dauphin.

And a special shout out to the players of both kings. Both were petty and petulant and magnanimous in equal measures, in exactly the way the game needed to work.

³⁴ They’re doing fine, their immediate family is doing fine. I wanted to try and give them a stress-free evening and see them for myself. I really did want to go back to Kyiv this year. I missed it.

³⁵ I put 3,500 km on the car. Maybe not a lot, but it felt like a lot.

³⁶ It was Pomerol, which I have got to remember.