The Western Loire, or Pays de la Loire is another job-creation region. Like Rhone-Alpes for Lyon and Midi-Pyrenees for Toulouse, Pays de la Loire was created so that France's sixth city Nantes could be capital of it. Confusingly, for chateaux-twitchers, most of the famous Chateaux de la Loire are actually in Centre region. The bureaucrats did leave a couple of chateaux in Pays de la Loire though, and of these, the Chateau at Angers is the most impressive.
England's Henry II was born there, poison-gloved hit-queen Catherine de Medici lived there and, ironically for Johnny Frenchman, the Duke of Wellington received his military training there. If you visit, don't miss the fourteenth-century Apocalypse Tapestry, a magnificent end-of-he-world comic-strip, medieval-stylee. All your apocalyptic favourites are there, including The Four Horsemen, The Whore of Babylon and The Beast.
Now, you may have been under the impression that The Number of the Beast is 666, but scholars now dispute this and suggest that The Number is actually 616. It's all down to Hebrew gematria, in which every letter in Hebrew represents a number. The Beast is widely thought to represent the Roman Emperor Nero. If you take the Greek spelling 'Neron Caesar', translate it into Hebrew and add up the letters, you get 666. If you take the Latin spelling 'Nero Caesar', you get 616. While the scholars are slugging it out, why not get a friend to translate your name into Hebrew and work out you own Beastly Number? Mine's 726.
La Résidence - THE French Property People
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