Look For the Little White Dog

Jean Gourmelin was a French 20th century illustrator born in 1920, who produced works that highlighted the absurd and fantastical. He most often worked in pen and ink, but sometimes made engravings, paintings and sculptures. His works play with space, time and chance. 

Stained glass window in the chapel of the Chateau Royal de Blois.

He was born in Paris and his parents worked for a wealthy Jewish family in their grand townhouse. At school the art teacher was quick to recognise his talent. When he was fourteen his parents bought a shop in Vendome and the family moved. At high school he encountered artists working in various media who mentored and influenced him. 

After graduating from art school he worked designing and printing luxury wallpaper and very quickly became known in these circles. During the Second World War he worked as an industrial designer in a factory, in order to escape conscription into the compulsory work programme. 

The little white dog which is the 'signature' of Jean Gourmelin.

From 1951 to 1969 he collaborated with his cousin Claude Serre, who was also an illustrator, and the master stained glass artist Max Ingrand. In that time they produced several series of stained glass windows, most notably for the chapels in the grounds of the chateaux of Blois and Amboise, and the cathedrals in Rouen and Saint-Malo.

All of the glass, both 16th originals and 19th century repairs, at the Chapel of the Chateau de Blois, and much of the glass in other churches in Blois, was destroyed during the American bombing campaign of 1944. After the War Ingrand and Gourmelin were commissioned to create new windows for the chapel. They worked together after the War on the windows of the chapel of Saint Hubert at the Chateau of Amboise as well. To recognise Gourmelin's work, look for the little dog with the curly tail, which is his personal 'signature'.

Stained glass in the Chapelle Saint Hubert, in the grounds of the Chateau Royal d'Amboise.

The windows in the Chapelle Saint Hubert in Amboise were made in Ingrand's workshop in 1952. They were conserved in 2022-24 as part of a total restoration of the chapel. Those of the Chapelle Saint Calais in the grounds of the Chateau Royal de Blois, were made in the same workshop in 1957, and have never been restored.

From 1961 onwards Gourmelin worked with science fiction writers and political journals. From 1971 onwards he participated in a television programme with other contemporary artists, illustrators and cartoonists. 

In 2000 he developed a degenerative eye disease and gave up drawing. From 2008 he had a series of strokes, and died at the age of 90 in 2011. He and his wife had lived for 60 years in Hauts-de-Seine outside of Paris.

A Big Step

We had a proper thunderous storm yesterday afternoon, the sort where if the road gutters aren't clean, houses get flooded.

That's not likely to worry the owner of this building.

I am interested that it still retains its Hand of Fatima door knocker.

8 Mai

The 8th of May is "Victoire 45", a public holiday in France celebrating the end of the 2nd World War in Europe. The day is marked with celebrations and parades throughout France, and in Preuilly sur Claise it is no different.

We will be gathering at the Mairie just before 11:00 and then walking as a group to the war memorial for a short series of speeches and wreath laying. Afterwards we will be in the Salle de Fêtes for a glass of something and little nibbles.

The War Memorial at Verneuil, dressed for tomorrow

A Phoney Post

Readers with good memory will remember that when we were in Australia 18 months ago I had to buy a new phone. That was because although the phone we took with us was 4G, it wasn't the flavour of 4G that Australia went to once they turned off the 3G signal.

When we got home that became my looking at the internet and maps phone, and I kept using my Wiko phone I bought in July 2022. 

The first pic I took with my old phone

Yesterday the Australian phone became my main phone, and the Wiko is reduced to photo duties. It took 18 months for that to happen because I was dreading having to properly set up a new phone, and it turned out rightly so. I don't know how anyone deals with the stress of migrating to a new phone every year, whilst trying to maintain some sort of privacy.

The first pic I took with my new phone

Anyway. The new phone is working, and happily still doesn't receive a reliable signal while I am at home. 

Something Fishy Is Going On

On the 4th of October 2024 we posted about having written 6000 blog posts which had been viewed 4,408,662 times.

Things have changed since then: our all time visits now stand at 11,288,340, with 26,799 visits yesterday, and 482,374 visits last month.

I was interested enough to ask ClaudeAI what the reason could be. I had my suspicions, and this was the answer:

This is a really interesting question, and I think I can offer a strong likely explanation — though there may be more than one factor at play.

**The most probable cause: AI bot crawling**

Your blog covers nature, wildlife, history, French life, and food — exactly the kind of rich, detailed, original content that AI companies are aggressively harvesting to train their large language models. Automated traffic surpassed human-generated activity for the first time in a decade, accounting for 51% of all web traffic in 2024. Since then it's grown further.

Research from 2024 found that a record 16% of "general invalid traffic" from known bots was generated by AI scrapers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and AppleBot. These bots hit every page they can find, and Blogger/Blogspot doesn't filter them out of your view counts the way more sophisticated platforms do. Your 6,000+ posts across many years give bots an enormous amount of pages to crawl.

Crawling traffic spiked twice — first in November 2024, then again between March and April 2025 — which aligns suspiciously well with your traffic jump from October 2024 onwards.

**Other contributing factors worth considering:**

- **Compound SEO effect.** 

With 6,000+ posts built up over years, older posts continue to accumulate search ranking authority over time. A blog that old and that prolific keeps climbing organically in search results for niche queries about French nature, Loire Valley history, orchids, dragonflies, etc.

- **AI-generated search results driving curiosity.**When AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity cite or reference content about French natural history or life in the Loire Valley, some users do click through — even if the click-through rate is low.

- **Growing anglophone interest in rural France.**There's been sustained growth in people researching relocating to or visiting rural France, which is squarely your content.

The short version: you've built a genuinely valuable archive of content at exactly the moment AI companies started hoovering up the internet, and your view counter is almost certainly catching a lot of that automated activity.

I was right in my suspicions, but this is slightly worrying. The half life of facts would suggest that much of the stuff on the blog no longer applies. Add in the whimsy, local misdirections and suppositions and I wonder how relevant a lot of the information is now. We don't set out to deceive, but anyone looking for definitive, up to date information is likely to be directed by AI to restaurants that no longer exist (I've checked), boulangeries that closed 10 years ago (checked that too), and expect the sewing machine man to be at the market (not for many years). Or indeed other towns that have "Preuilly" in their names.

This is just one reason we would never use AI to write a blog post - once you have fact checked everything it turns out easier to do it ourselves -  although I have in the past used AI to restructure and check grammar and spelling (UK English).

Should I ask Claude how many times he has crawled the blog?

The Church in Saint Flovier

The 19th century church in the village of Saint Flovier, 15 minutes down the road from us.

Until last week I had never set foot inside the church in Saint Flovier. It is 19th century and I assumed that the interior would be faux medieval wall paintings and saccharine 19th century Madonnas. Well I was right. But the church also has a couple of decent 17-18th century paintings, and some chunky 15th century choir stalls with a range of misericords. There is another, 20th century treasure contained in this church, but I'll write about it another time.

Finial on one of the 15th century choir stalls.

The church was constructed in the 1880s in the Romanesque style. It replaced a 12th century church which was in a poor state of repair and too small. The architect was well known for his historic restorations and came from Paris. Inside notable artists of the day from Tours, Orleans and Paris created the decoration, including stained glass from the workshop of Luc Fournier in Tours. The paintings from the old church were transferred to the new one.

Finial on one of the 15th century choir stalls.

The 15th century oak choir stalls had come from the old abbey church in Beaulieu les Loches which had been destroyed in the Revolution. As was the norm for the time they feature misericords, or a sort of hinged ledge which functioned as a seat but allowed the monks to appear to be standing whilst they suffered through long services, or 'offices'. The misericords are carved with a variety of quirky subjects, mixing the sacred and the profane, clowns and devils, and illustrations of proverbs. Images such as 'green men' swallowing or spitting leaves symbolise the renewal of Nature. Debauchery is depicted by a pig's head or performing clowns.

The end of one of the 15th century choir stalls.

There is also a set of much more staid 17th century oak choir stalls. They were made during the reign of Louis XIII and feature acanthus leaves, angel's heads, pomegranates, swans and fish, in the style of their time.

A misericord depicting fish on a 17th century choir stall.

A misericord depicting pomegranates on a 17th century choir stall.

Misericord on a 15th century choir stall, depicting a jester with a rattle.

A misericord on one of the 15th century choir stalls, depicting a man in bed I think, although he's got his eyes open and wearing a tunic or doublet.

A 15th century misericord, depicting a man with a fashionable forked beard.

A 15th misericord depicting a boar's head.

A 15th century misericord depicting an acrobat exposing his backside. Images such as this are surprisingly common in medieval churches.