Tour Denecourt

Sunday
"Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel."
Katherine Mansfield

We came across this quote on a plaque while we were out enjoying the wonderful blue skies and sunshine in the Forest early this afternoon. Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19 she left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became friends with modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. During the First World War she contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death in Fontainebleau at the age of 34. She is buried in a cemetery in nearby Avon. I came across another quote of hers which I liked and need to pay attention to
"Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy you can't build on it, it's only for wallowing in."

The Tour Denecourt, shown in my blip, is named after Claude Francois Denecourt (1788-1875). Back in the early 1800s, the few printed tourist guides for the Forest of Fontainebleau area focused on the Royal Chateau of Fontainebleau, treating the forest and nearby village of Barbizon as afterthoughts. Denecourt was to change all that, by writing a number of illustrated tourist books and self-guided walking maps that appealed to the Parisian masses hoping to escape the hot and crowded city for a day. He then progressed to not only writing about the area but laying out himself paths in the forest, which he marked with blue arrows painted on trees and boulders. At his death, there were 150 km of well marked trails throughout the forest, which remain to this day, still bearing the blue markers, and bearing the name "Denecourt - Colinet ", Colinet (1839-1905), being Denecourt's successor.

This evening was the Service of Lessons and Carols at our English-speaking church in Fontainebleau, followed by mulled wine and mince pies. There was a good turn out and it was most enjoyable and uplifting.

One year ago: Victorian Holiday Village