48 hours in Puisaye

Burgundy-Franche-Comté/2023

France is vast and beautiful, every region has its own identity, and almost every département has its own secret corner, still more or less untouched by tourism - thanks to the grace of the main roads that avoid it, its distance from urban centers, its apparent lack of appeal. Occasionally, light is shed by a distant voice, a look, words that have described and told a simple story. Pays de Caux has Maupassant, Berry has George Sand and Puisaye has Colette.

The tour seems easy to plan: Saint-Fargeau and its château, Saint-Sauveur, Sidonie-Gabrielle's native village, the setting for her very first novel, the very first "auto-fiction", Claudine à l'école. Then there's Moutiers, with its oft-mentioned Romanesque church, and Toucy, where you'll have to go to taste fras, the cheesecake she was particularly fond of, which you can find at the lovely Saturday morning market. This is the heart of the Puisaye region, a beautiful countryside of authentic villages where real estate is not suffering from fever. This immersion reminds the many city dwellers that every grove is a treasure. Green relaxation finds its best expression on the banks of Lac du Bourdon or in the Boutissaint nature park with its free-roaming animals. Moreover, more than landscapes or inanimate stones, Colette describes the living, the human, the warmth. Her memories are Proustian reminiscences, recalling emotions and triggering feelings. Her work is made up of heartbeats, and Puisaye recalls, with every mile, the truth of the moment, that of an oak tree or a sunset. When she returns to her birthplace, she revisits the trees, the colors, the outlines of a happy childhood, but above all she shows the need to immerse herself in her living universe. "But at the age of 16, returning to Puisaye after a fortnight in theaters, museums and stores, I brought back, among memories of coquetry, greed, mixed with regrets, hopes and contempt as spirited, as candid and gangly as myself, the astonishment, the melancholy aversion of what I called houses without animals... These apartments deprived of familiar spirits, where the hand, in search of a cordial caress, collides with inanimate marble, wood and velvet, I left them with hungry senses, the vehement need to touch, alive, fleeces or leaves, warm feathers, the moving moisture of flowers... As if discovering them together, I greeted, inseparable, my mother, the garden and the round of animals. " Take the A77 to Burgundy, exit 21, and rediscover a familiar world, the Puisaye, with its millions of little creatures, its "people of the grass", its houses and its inhabitants. The imposing Château de Saint-Fargeau, with its two large round towers framing the main gate, is a curiosity no more important than the market held on Fridays, or the pretty road leading to Saint-Sauveur, with its views over the surrounding hills, bocage and meadows, and above all the perfumes that accompany the gaze. Saint-Sauveur is a jewel frozen in time, and Colette's house is well worth a visit. To say that her soul floats there is a truism. Better to read the books. To finish the tour with the sound of a corkscrew, head north, around the Yonne valley, to the wine-producing villages that have their own specialties: pinot in Irancy and Coulanges-la-Vineuse, sauvignon in Saint-Bris-le-Vineux, aligoté in Chitry.