anglo-saxon attitudes; Designer Rachel Riley has brought her quirky brand of thoroughly English chintz and charm to an exquisite miniature chateau on the Loire.

Byline: Hamish Bowles

The valley of the river Loire is wide and open as an ocean's estuary. Stately poplars, dappled by the water's reflected silver light, line its banks, creating a shimmering view that Monet might have painted. Along the river's bluffs cluster sleepy pale stone villages, or tracts of verdant parkland elegantly punctuated with stately medieval ch,teaux, eighteenth-century gentilhommeries, and prim Second Empire mansions where legions of Madame Bovarys must have sighed away their lives.

Here is the quintessence of middle France, the place where the great director Claude Chabrol lived and set his movies that slyly dissect the bourgeois ...