In Château Land

In the twilight years before the Great War reshaped the world, a traveler traces the dreaming spires and velvet gardens of France's most magnificent châteaux. Departing from the silver waters of Lake Como, she enters Touraine, that lush province the French call the Garden of France, where Renaissance kings built their pleasure palaces amid forests and rivers. What unfolds is neither a guidebook nor a chronicle, but something rarer: a meditation on beauty itself, rendered through leisurely days spent wandering Chartres-towered courtyards, watching afternoon light slope across formal parterres, and listening to stories of the royals and ruffians who once inhabited these stone monuments to power and passion. Wharton writes with the affectionate eye of someone who truly sees, finding equal wonder in a peasant's cottage garden as in the grand salons where Catherine de' Medici once plotted. This is travel writing as it used to be crafted - unhurried, literate, and suffused with the quiet pleasure of moving through a world where elegance still mattered.