In 1496, King Charles VIII had a dream.

In Valençay, about an hour away from Amboise, is a monument commemorating ninety-one men and thirteen women agents of F Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who died, many in concentration camps, for working with the French Resistance.

Michel de Gast was Captain of the famous Forty-Five bodyguards of Henry III.

Who now remembers the woman who took on Napoleon and rattled his cage?

‘Leave it to George’ , a polite way of saying ‘pass the buck’, was once a popular saying in the UK and in America, however it originated in France.

It’s often hard to unscramble fact from fiction regarding the history of the French royal family. Not so in the case of the assassination of Henry III, the last Valois king.

Max Ernst, the French Surrealist, died on his birthday, 1 April 1976. He loved the irony. It was, you might say, surreal.

Anne of Beaujeu, Regent of France, invited a young man with the extraordinary name of Perkin Warbeck to the French Court at Château Amboise.