A Chateau of One's Own Read online

There was one town beyond Châteauneuf called Juvardeil. This was the town of ‘our’ chateau, the official mailing address. A pleasant nineteenth-century hamlet, Juvardeil had one church, one tabac, a boulangerie and a gentle river. It was considerably more promising than Châteauneuf. The houses were older, more sixteenth- and seventeenth-century. The church was mid 1800s, but well preserved and graceful, perched there above the river.

  In times past, the town would have belonged to the chateau. We stopped briefly in front of the church and read about the history of Juvardeil. The Romans had founded the town in the second century and Gauls refortified it in the seventh century. Most significantly, General Bonchamps was born in Juvardeil.

  Philippe’s directions were less than clear to us in our excitable state and we could not find the chateau. We stopped at the bar-tabac for information. Dark, a bit seedy, stained yellow from years of filter-less cigarette smoke, the bar nevertheless seemed like a nice respite on a dreadful day. A reasonably attractive woman with black hair to her waist sat behind the bar dragging strongly on a Gitanes. At the end of the bar, a red-haired villager sat over a small glass of red wine. The floral wallpaper tugged away from weeping walls. An assortment of candies and treats as well as cigarettes and cigars lined the makeshift shelves. Formica chairs filled the small space. Ancient wood beams drooped lazily from the ceiling, witness to better days long ago.

  ‘Bonjour. I am looking for the Château du Bonchamps. Do you know it?’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Non,’ the barman responded. I detected a slight wince as I spoke my broken French. Not an uncommon response when I launch into the language of Racine.

  The bar’s sole red-headed denizen, whom I immediately dubbed ‘Monsieur le Rouge’, rose from his lunchtime cocktail. ‘I can show you if you drive me home,’ he muttered.

  We all left the warm tabac and squeezed clumsily into our hire car. Monsieur le Rouge sat in the front next to me while Bud sat in the back cuddling Blue. We set off down the road. To the left was a homely little country lane scarred with holes. At the entrance to the lane, we found a set of outbuildings and former farmhouses that at one time had serviced the chateau.

  ‘It’s there. Now, can you bring me home,’ our guide demanded with a hint of a slur issuing from a face that looked like a burst tomato sitting uncomfortably on his thick neck.

  We did our agreed duty and drove him ten minutes to his small stone farmhouse, then returned and started up the lane. Blue had settled down into a comfortable sleep as we moved from barely paved road to dirt lane. At the entrance of the estate stood a dozen or so Lebanese cedars, from the early 1800s by the look of them – massive with thick trunks and long branches that splayed across the road like an opened hand. We drove by them and continued on for a few minutes. I noted my odometer – 500 metres from the cedar guardians to the house.

  ‘Far enough away from the road for the cats?’ I asked Bud.

  ‘We’ll see. I still think it’s too big.’

  ‘Be open. Think big and good things will happen.’

  The rain continued. The car’s windows were fogged up but we could faintly make out the straight, stately lines of the roof of the chateau. As we approached the house, a vast woods appeared to our left and a muddy, barren field to our right. A bit closer and we saw the north wing of the chateau. We rolled by the front and continued to the end of the chateau for what seemed a very long time. A 50-metre facade indeed. Not bad. Countless rows of windows, shuttered for the winter. The place was immense. In a state of restrained delirium, I thought to myself finally, my own little Versailles. The chateau was awe-inspiring.

  Philippe and Laurent were parked out front awaiting our arrival. I stopped, jumped out of the car and tapped on their window. In 15 seconds, I was soaking wet.

  ‘Do you have the key?’ I enquired.

  ‘No, we do not have a key but we will find a way in,’ Philippe said.

  As we scrambled around the exterior of the chateau, Philippe told us the owner’s son, Jehan-Claude, spelled in the old style, but pronounced ‘Jean-Claude’, worked as a bus driver in Angers. He took on this new métier just after the chateau – a home for handicapped adults – had closed four years back. Since 1969, the chateau had served as home to more than 30 adults with Down’s syndrome. After almost 30 years, the institution was forced to shut its doors due to lack of funds.

  We all searched frantically in the rain for an entrée. Philippe’s sidekick Laurent scurried around, industrious if not entirely effective in refined Parisian loafers, camel-hair coat and exceptional eyewear, which did not serve him well in the torrential downpour.

  After twenty minutes, I happened to pass a locked shutter and noticed, by chance, an open window. Voilà! We commandeered a bench from the back of the house and propped it against the old chateau walls. Philippe and his colleague mounted the bench, looking like two fussy lovers daintily arranging flowers. The two figures appeared miniscule against the stone walls of this grand structure. This window, like the hundred or so others, measured two and a half to three metres high. I tended to be useless in these situations, so I let the ‘men’ work. Finally, they broke two wooden slats of the shutter. Laurent put his small hand into the crevice and gingerly unwound a bit of wire that held the shutter closed. We were in!

  We all climbed through the window hastily. The rain blew into the house as if someone had tossed a bucket in. The place was dark and sealed, coffin-like. No electricity. The shutters and doors throughout had been locked and secured with wire.

  Jehan-Claude, however, had left this one window open behind the closed shutter in order to create a cross-vent to dry out the place. If not for this housekeeping, we would never have seen the house. One small, responsible act and Jehan-Claude’s life, and ours, changed forever.

  The next 45 minutes were a whirlwind of confusion and wonder. We darted from room to room, endlessly prying open shutters for light and bumping into old furnishings, which were the only inhabitants now of this monstrous space. I frantically snapped pictures, the flash illuminating too briefly the object of our desire.

  Throughout the chateau, France’s finest tradesmen had left intricately carved plaster mouldings with delicate ceiling rosettes and fleurs-de-lis. Handsome marble fireplaces could be found in each room in an endless stream of elegance. To say we were on sensory overload is insufficient. The vastness of the space was simply incomprehensible. If you’ve ever visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the National Portrait Gallery in London… well, it wasn’t that big. But close.

  Mixed in with these wonderful details were slices of a not-so-glorious past. The interior of the place was covered in 1970s wallpaper. Particle-board doors were stuck in doorways where once oak-carved doors from centuries prior had stood. The place felt institutional in the worst sort of way. A bit like the hotel in 1970s horror movie The Shining, but especially decorated for neglected inmates. But we could fix all that, no problem, I thought, only half-believing my own assertions.

  Our plane was leaving in a little over three hours, the exact amount of time it took to get from here to there. We jumped into our cars and took a quick tour of the outbuildings. The stables, chicken houses, piggeries, horse-washes and garages formed an exceptionally large complex almost equal in size to the chateau. Large white wooden doors stood guard over the buildings’ mysterious contents. The outbuildings looked exactly like the buildings at the head of the lane: stone covered in ‘crèpi’, or sand finish, with tuffeau decoration and red-brick accents along portals and gateways. The roofs were in poor condition, composed of slate, with dilapidated gutters and chimneys with crumbling bricks poking out here and there.

  We only had 45 quick, meaningful minutes at the chateau, in the dark and howling rain. As we drove to Paris, we spoke quickly and heatedly.

  ‘Bud, we have to buy that house.’

  ‘It’s too big. There is so much work to do. And did you see all that wallpaper? And what happened to the doors? They’re all new. I want our hous
e to be our home, cosy and comfortable for Blue and any others that might come along.’

  ‘We can make it warmer. And the size of it allows us to grow the B&B. We can add more rooms and houses as we have money.’ Americans – always on about growing something or other. Bigger is better, more is more.

  ‘We don’t have that much money. We have just enough to cover the down payment, some renovations. But we still have to buy furniture. And those bathrooms! They are the worst sort of institutional things I’ve ever seen. It’s like an insane asylum.’

  Childishly optimistic, I persisted. ‘But it is impressive. People will want to come, to stay. We can do well and support ourselves.’

  ‘Sam, you don’t know what a renovation like this involves. Granted, you can change a light bulb, but that’s about it. We’ll have to hire so many workmen, pay so much money. And the B&B thing is by no means certain. That will take time.’

  I hate it when she’s right. ‘Stop thinking like a culchie.’ Oops. Not the right thing to say. I intentionally used the word in Irish for a country bumpkin. Honestly, I have nothing against country people. But I thought the word would ring a few bells with Bud. It just slipped out. Luckily, Bud is comfortable in her country roots. Always the more mature, sensible part of the equation, she simply said, ‘OK. You’ll see. We are going to choke on this house.’

  I couldn’t understand her objections. The conflict centred on two minor details: the size and the cost.

  The asking price was well beyond our meagre resources. Philippe told us the chateau could be had for about 20 per cent less than the asking price or about 2.9 million francs. This came to about £300,000 at the time, plus fees and government taxes. Persistent, I pointed out again that this was the price of a modest closet in Manhattan or London. Of course, the difference was you could make a living in these cities. The B&B might never bring in sufficient income to cover the loan. A specious venture at best, disastrous at worst.

  We had managed to pull together about $170,000 in our time in New York. Our life’s savings. At 33 years of age, not terribly bad, but far from sufficient. If we could make a sizeable down payment while maintaining my current income, all would be good. But buying the house meant taking the plunge of leaving a reasonably lucrative living in New York for the unknown vagaries of life in the French countryside. No guaranteed earnings, just sweat, equity and perseverance.

  I’d worked in news my entire career, a career that began at age 25. I was now a television producer making documentaries. I had worked for a number of news networks covering the White House, international affairs, daily national news, plane crashes and any other newsworthy event that might bring in a few viewers. My most recent documentaries were good and salacious – Extreme Fighting and Models on the Côte d’Azur. Not particularly highbrow, but fun nonetheless. I never intended to go into television. Yet not everyone in television was vapid and mean. Most, but not all.

  Things had improved over the years and now I was doing something where I determined the hours, often the subject matter, where I travelled and how much I spent on each project. I worked moderately hard but turned out one-hour docs quickly. My compensation weighed far above my exertion.

  Until we had Blue, Bud worked as a fashion designer, a pattern-maker for a mercurial, high-end designer who made $200 T-shirts for waifs. Bud brought in a good bit too. Not rich, but not poor. We were frugal in a way that would allow us to save one full income a year.

  The idiocy and wonder of the whole endeavour rested in the simple fact that we were planning to leave two sought-after jobs in the world’s busiest city for the uncertainty of a ‘simpler’ country life and the slim rewards of the hospitality business. However, the jump from a one-bedroom, 600-square-foot apartment to 15,000–square-foot chateau on 40 acres was a substantial move up.

  As I sped on down the autoroute toward Charles de Gaulle airport, weaving in and out of lanes like a drunken sailor, Bud sat quietly in the back feeding Blue for the entire trip.

  We both slipped into the quiet of our own thoughts, mulling over the possibilities and challenges, manipulating our prospects each in our own way, to our own liking. Then we hit Paris, and the vaunted Périphérique. This dreadful concoction of roads and connections forms an almost perfect ring around the City of Light. That’s all we could see, lights. Red lights. The entire Périphérique was one enormous car park.

  ‘Damn! We’re going to be late. Can you look at the map and find a better route?’

  Bud looked hurriedly at the map. The black and red and blue lines formed a jumble of confused options. We were dead still on the ring. It appeared our current route was in fact the best route despite the lack of movement.

  We edged forward 15, 20 metres at a jog. The car was filled with tension. Our tiredness, the difficulty of travelling with baby, the vision of the chateau playing aggressively in our heads. Too much. We stopped again. I glanced furtively at the clock every ten seconds as our plane’s departure loomed. There must be an easier way to go about things. But we are Irish and Cajun. Nothing was meant to be nor will it ever be simple. We love suffering. It is our calling.

  At last, the ring opened up at our exit to the airport. I pressed the accelerator and we sped toward the chaos of Charles de Gaulle. After two wrong turns and a misread sign, I pulled into the car rental car park. We piled out of the car, like a clown car, bodies and bags and babies cast about willy-nilly. I didn’t bother to sign the car out properly and left it in front of the check-out office.

  We ran to the security check-in. ‘Can I see your passports, please?’

  ‘Of course.’ I searched my pockets. Then our bags. The nappy bag, the baby, Bud. No luck. I looked at Bud in disbelief. If there is a hard way to do something, we will find it and pursue this path with fidelity and consistency.

  I ran back to the car. The passports were stuffed protectively in the rear seat pocket. I gathered my booty and fled. The attendant was waiting, patiently. We trundled onto the plane and collapsed in heaps, like a sack of spuds. Blue slept. Then Bud. Then me.

  The seven-hour flight back left us more time for reflection. The chateau seemed, to me, like a good starter house. Think about it: if offered the chance to take on a limitless old property in middle-of-nowhere France, wouldn’t you do it? The price: just over three million francs with no proper income in sight. And all you had to do was leave a sizeable income on the table. Just walk away with no retirement at the ascending peak of your career. An easy decision… non?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Fowl Smell of Success

  We returned to our tiny apartment in New York and the task of understanding what we were about to do. The only thing pushing us forward, stretching us beyond our primal fear, was the hectic clamour of New York and the difficulty of raising our firstborn in a cantankerous city. The scarcity of resources, the limited space, the astronomical property prices, the unattractive blandness of living in the suburbs all pointed to a new life in the country. The move to France was very attractive.

  The chateau’s qualities surged to the front of our minds as we entered the dark, dirty entrance hall to our apartment building. After the assaults of JFK Airport, the near-death experience of driving from there to our building on First Avenue, and the pungency of the fetid East River, we were left to unlock our depressing metal front door. The building was erected in the late 1940s. The stairs were caked in years of mud, paint flaked off the walls and a high ceiling was weakly illuminated by one bulb. We walked into our apartment, bags and baby Blue in tow.

  Our ‘living space’, about 600 square feet, consisted of a small dining area (littered with seven cat litters), a slightly larger living room, a bedroom and something that, in the most generous of compliments, could be called a galley kitchen. Boxes were stacked throughout the apartment touching plain white ceilings. Our view, if it could be called such, looked out onto the roof of the Dangerfield’s comedy club beneath us and beyond that onto a brick wall. There were four large, newly installed wind
ows that did allow a fair bit of light in. The bathroom had last been remodelled in 1951 (we had found the receipt) and comprised a small toilet, tiny shower and chipped porcelain sink.

  To note merely that our potential move would be a big change is like saying death makes one less active. I would venture to say that our move from First Avenue in Manhattan to Château du Bonchamps in the Loire Valley would be the largest square footage adjustment in history. The chateau harboured many rooms that were larger than our entire apartment. We were aching to get out.

  Bud still felt the castle was too big. Our desperate failure to find an affordable house in Ireland did give her pause. We argued about our capabilities, our limits. Would we have enough resources, financially and physically, to take on something so immense? Could we, after all this time of searching, really make the move, truly dive in and cut ourselves off from what we had been so diligently toiling at for so many years? In the end, though, why does anyone make a change? Why do people leave the security of a conventional life with benefits and a steady salary? This is where Bud and I agreed. People change their lot because they are not really happy. We ourselves were not satisfied with the life we had created. In light of our current unhappiness with life in the fast lane, we made a non-refundable deposit of 230,000 francs (£24,000) on the Château du Bonchamps.

  Soon after we paid the deposit and settled back into our grotty hovel for the time being, I received a call. It was RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster. Earlier the previous year, I had applied to be head of a new 24-hour news channel on the Emerald Isle. The slightly incomprehensible voice on the other end of the line informed me that I had made it into the final round for interviews.

  Bud and I debated and demurred and finally decided that I would go. The trip was fully paid for by the kind taxpayers of Ireland. I could visit the chateau again in France and really see what we were about to buy.

  The interview went well. Of course, my mind was elsewhere, in France. I always perform better when I know I have an out, another option. During the interview, I kept telling myself that I was moving to France and assuming my rightful place as ersatz nobility, reclaiming my patrimony after a few centuries of respite in Louisiana.