On 1 November, we were delighted to have a reason, a very good reason, to go native. We felt very French as we joined the throng of people who pass our window every year bearing gigantic pots of beautiful chrysanthemums on their way to the old, very old, cemetery in Amboise.

Catherine suffers from a bad press but she was not the Lady Macbeth portrayed by some biographers or, as some historians make her out to be, a monster with two heads.

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was brought up in Château Amboise with Catherine de Medicis many children. On Mary’s marriage to Catherine’s son Francis (II), Catherine gave her a rope of precious black pearls.

Simone Lacour, the world renowned artist, lived in Rilly-sur-Loire, a small community near Amboise. Renowned. Not famous. It’s doubtful even art anoraks have heard of her. Is this because, with a horror of being classified, she was never part of any art movement?

Intrigued by the neglected home in Amboise* of the once famous writer Jehanne/Joan Orliac, we went in search for her grave and for the once famous Golden Gates which stood next to her house.

After more than five hundred years, thousands of books and millions of words written about Leonardo da Vinci, there are not many mysteries left surrounding him.

Three minutes out of town eagle eyed motorists may spot a sad old building squatting forlornly among the weeds, partially hidden by a forbidding wall. If they can be bothered to investigate they can read a plaque saying that it was once an Entrance Pavilion to the astonishing Palace of Chanteloup.

The Saint Bris family in Amboise are more than the justifiably proud owners of the lovely Château Clos Lucé and its magnificent gardens, they are far more important than that. Much more. They are custodians of the, well, it’s not too fanciful to say, soul, of Leonardo da Vinci. If his soul is anywhere, it’s here. Where he would want it to be. He certainly didn’t want to die in Italy. He never expressed any desire to return to the land of his birth.