A Chateau of One's Own Read online

  But of course, they had just arrived, spirits were high. We could afford some frivolity. The youngsters charged off around the property to investigate their new domain.

  ‘What do you think about the lads?’ I ventured to Bud. ‘They seem enthusiastic. I hope it works out. Leo has done work like this before. I think he will keep the other two in line.’

  ***

  So our first week at the chateau began. Bud appeared happy to be here. Her cats were safe, and Blue was relatively happy as long as she could breastfeed on demand and pull the cats’ tails whenever one had the lack of good sense to wander near.

  We did feel like we had embarked on a tremendous adventure. We had moved a cattery, fashioned a bed, opened countless shutters and engaged close family to start work on the house. There was only one small problem: we had not actually purchased the house yet.

  The acte de vente, or closing, was set for the end of July. The owner allowed us to move in early as he was not using the house and probably thought it was a good way to secure the sale of a house that had been on the market for four years. This had at first seemed incredible to us. The original asking price, 3.5 million francs or £360,000, was laughable. The more we toured the house, the less we laughed. The chateau had been tempting but frightfully forbidding for the many potential buyers who had passed through its tall double doors. Philippe the estate agent told us there had been many visits, mostly French. However, for them, the dream of owning a chateau – though wild and exotic – is a risk most dare not take.

  For many, chateaux are vestiges of a feudal system that was rightfully slaughtered in 1789 during the French Revolution, when several hundred thousand nobles and clergy were guillotined over a period of five years. Chateaux across France were seized, ransacked and razed. Yet the French still revere the families that live in today’s chateaux. They rarely admit it, but the chateau owner, whether French or foreign, will always be treated with a touch of awe, a dash of wariness and, quite often, suspicion. The châtelains had for centuries taken advantage of the less fortunate. It’s an age-old truth that those in power will do many things to keep those without in their place.

  Even with all the work to do, it amazed us that the house hadn’t been able to find a buyer. We are not architects or engineers, but everything seemed to be sound. The wood frame in the attic, called a charpente, was in good working order with no termites, though there were signs of woodworm. But older charpentes are made from oak and after 150 to 300 years, without serious attack, they are like steel. The roof was OK. It was relatively old, possibly 15 to 30 years. The thin black slates, or ardoise, had gone missing here and there. An ambitious renovator might set upon this task, but certainly not us.

  The crépi that covered the exterior of the chateau was largely missing on the rear of the house. A good bit of it on the front was dark and mouldy. We thought it made the house look old, distinguished. Others would say ‘abîmé’, or dilapidated. The faltering state of the chateau was not aided by the largely crumbling stone cornice on three different levels. This was more serious, aesthetically speaking. There were parts missing, parts in good condition and parts waiting to fall. We had two choices: hire stonemasons to cut, extract and replace the stone cornice; or hire the same stonemasons to create a paste of tuffeau, silicon and sand which they could mould to match the cornice and fill in the blanks. This last choice was cheaper and thus preferable. The exact cost, unknown.

  The plumbing and electrics were all good. But two bathrooms were not enough, to say the least. The outbuildings, from what we could gather, were in good order with some patches of new roof.

  So much potential. But there is an ever-so-important corollary to this hopeful phrase. So much potential… so much money! Sure, you could put a million British pounds into the beast. We were planning on closer to 600 or 700 thousand francs or (50 or 60 thousand pounds) – with furniture, bathrooms, fixtures, etc. And light fixtures; there were no light fixtures in the entire house. But, thankfully, we only had about a hundred to buy.

  In our property search, we had come across another chateau just down the road. It was not for sale, but offered high-end bed and breakfast to paying guests. Philippe had informed us that the chateau was owned by a local count, a noble whose family stretched back to the Middle Ages. Philippe assured us that the count made a decent living with his 15-room hotel. We were curious. And so, a few days after we arrived, we planned a visit to the mysterious count. We loaded up the red van – five adults and a baby.

  After 15 minutes of driving we saw signs for the ‘Château des Fontaines’. We truly were in the middle of la France profonde, the heart of the French countryside. Large open fields of pear and apple trees fanned out over hills and into the near horizon. We passed through a small town with the now common sight of an impressive Gothic church. In minutes we found the beginning of a long lane leading to the count’s house. ‘Everything is so perfect here,’ I noted.

  Nobody spoke as I turned into a neatly laid stone lane. On either side, the lawn extended, perfectly cut, to surrounding woods. There was a pond to our left with two regal swans holding court and fishing for their morning meal.

  I pulled up to the chateau. We had been told that this was the sister chateau of Bonchamps. It resembled our own with one small difference: it was perfect. There was a long central bay and two wings forming a vague ‘U’ shape, just like ours. Lilacs and roses and a lovely trellis framed the front of the chateau immaculately.

  We piled out of our old banger and made our way to the front door. Perhaps this is what we dreamt of when we decided to buy a castle. I rang the bell and a discreet tune emanated from the great hall. Through the tall, elegant windows, I saw a stout figure arrive at the door. He looked out cautiously at our wreck of a van, probably thinking we were tinkers looking to sell some discarded zinc or newly found floor tiles.

  ‘Oui?’ He was average in height with a deep tan. His jaw was wide and very prominent. He had a full crop of dark hair and close-set eyes. Not necessarily aristocratic but passably so.

  ‘Bonjour. Je suis Sam Juneau. Nous avons acheté le Château du Bonchamps à Juvardeil. Nous venons à vous visiter à dire… bonjour,’ I managed to spit out.

  ‘Oh, yes. I heard about you.’ He spoke English. A relief. ‘I am François de Richelieu. Please come in.’

  The ‘de’ in his name was the sure sign of nobility. He was ‘of ’ a certain place, a fiefdom given to his family in former days. It is a very serious offence in France to add the ‘de’ to your name without having ‘earned’ it. ‘Earn’ is used loosely here; I should say without having received some fiefdom or territory as a token of loyalty from a greater count, lord or prince. Though, I must note, Honoré de Balzac was not born with a ‘de’ and he managed to pull it off just fine, but the fact that he wrote eighty-something works in a thirty-year period served to allay noble anger at his substantial impertinence.

  We all pushed through the door awkwardly, happy to be allowed in. The main hall was a masterpiece. There was wood panelling throughout the length of the gallery with impeccable eighteenth-century paintings in the manner of Poussin. These were positioned gracefully over pieces of Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture, gilded, polished and splendid. François showed us into the main salon. There were paintings of noble faces, more rare furniture, two large, puffy couches and four doors leading out to the rear of the chateau. A large grassy field stretched out of sight framed by tall chestnut trees in very, very straight lines. The French are great planters of straight lines of trees.

  We sat knee by knee on the grand sofas and admired the intricately carved marble fireplace. In a large painting over the fireplace, little girls danced lightly on new-mown lawns in front of a vast fountain.

  I introduced us. ‘This is my wife, Brigid, our friends, Angus, Kate and Leo and, of course, baby Blue.’

  He nodded. ‘How long are you here?’

  ‘We arrived this week. Just getting settled in.’

  ‘You know, I looked
to buy your chateau. My brother has a chateau north of here in Vendôme and it is time for my sister to buy a chateau and have a hotel.’

  ‘Why didn’t you buy it?’

  ‘Too much work,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘There is much to do,’ Bud agreed.

  ‘Yes,’ the count continued, ‘the cornice is falling, the rooms are affreuses, just horrible. No bathrooms. The roof is old.’ OK, tell us something we don’t know. ‘How much did you pay for it?’ François asked. My experience of Europeans and especially French is they don’t tend to talk about money. The last thing available for conversation. Indiscret, as the French say. I was a bit off-balance.

  ‘Well, how much was it when you visited?’ I asked. ‘About two point five million francs.’ He didn’t miss a beat. We paid about two point seven with agent’s fees. I told him this.

  ‘That is correct. A good price. You should not pay more. Are you rich? Do you have a mortgage?’

  Again, surprisingly blunt.

  ‘No, not at all. And we do have a mortgage,’ I stammered.

  ‘You will have a very hard time making a living. I have inherited all of this, all the furniture, the house. I have no mortgage and each year I must struggle to bring people to the chateau. I pay so much in advertising, you cannot believe it. You should have bought something smaller, closer to a large town, like Saumur. This is the way to make a living. That is what we arranged for my sister. A small nineteenth-century chateau in the middle of Saumur.’ Saumur is a lovely medieval and Renaissance town on the banks of the Loire river about one hour directly east of our chateau. The tourists like it. ‘It will be very hard for you,’ he emphasised.

  Just what we needed to hear. And to think we had arrived chez François with hopes of idle chatter and a few introductions.

  ‘Yes, but the house is so grand and there will be many people who would want to stay in a chateau and visit the others in the region.’ I defended our honour, feebly.

  ‘But we are too far from the big castles – Chenonceau, Blois, Chambord,’ he retorted. ‘It is almost impossible. And with a mortgage, there is not much to say. You will buy the house, work on it, be unhappy, suffer through long, dark winters and sell in three years. You will sell for about what you bought it for and leave with nothing. It will be better than now, another foreigner will buy it for a little more. He will do some works. Then he will be discouraged and sell it for no profit to a French person. This is how it always goes.’

  We all sat stunned and offended at his directness, rudeness even. But François had an easy manner. He was not aggressive, just truthful, as he saw it. Obviously he had struggled to hold onto the family patrimony. He knew the vagaries and pains of maintaining a vast estate.

  ‘Yes, but our mortgage is not very large. We will use the Internet to market and pull in foreigners. And hopefully the French will come too.’

  What François said next was shocking.

  ‘You will get no French guests. They will not pay for this type of lodging. Eighty per cent of my business is foreign. English, Dutch, American. And the very rare French businessman.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I was confused.

  ‘Les Français sont appauvris.’

  ‘Appauvris?’

  ‘Yes, poor. The nation is poor. People have no money. The taxes are too high. The wages are low. And they are cheap. It is criminel.’

  Bud and I looked uncomfortably at one another. Help, I wanted to say. Could this be true? But there were so many nice things in this country. What about Dior? And fine Bordeaux wine? And Hermès? Who buys these things?

  François showed his impatience. He was obviously a busy man.

  ‘Well, I have some things to tend to. Please do come back. I will show you around next time.’

  ‘You should come visit us and see the house again,’ Bud gracefully suggested.

  We all stood and bid our au revoir. Bud and I were a bit unsteady. We were determined to prove him wrong. François was blunt, very un-French. But then again, the aristocrat always has lived by different rules. I presumed it was part of his act to be shocking and brusque.

  We loaded into the van and set off. I looked for a lifeline.

  ‘What do you think about what he said?’

  Bud pondered a moment. ‘It does worry me a little. But I think he must be wrong. There has to be a market for people who want to stay in a lovely, big chateau in the countryside. Anyway, it’s too late now. We’ve already moved the cats.’ She laughed uneasily. I looked in the rear-view mirror and was met by uncomfortable glances darting among our renovation team.

  The ride back to our chateau was mostly quiet. Bud and I glanced at one another and agreed in an unspoken pact to ignore the count. He was a Cassandra foretelling uncomfortable truths that we, in our hopeful condition, chose to view as lies.

  In any case, we had more pressing concerns. The current owner of our chateau had insisted on remaining in the old stable master’s house in the outbuildings. We were on the verge of buying the chateau and we had not yet seen the inside of this house. Nor had we seen the other 15–20,000 square feet of the remainder of the stables and outbuildings. As far as we could tell, the dépendances consisted of a T-shaped building with a former lodging on each end, one of them being the stable master’s house.

  Through broken windows we could see a ‘four à pain’, or bread oven, other stone fireplaces, remnants of doors and shutters and windows. But all was locked tight. Jehan-Claude strikes again. Very thorough, that fellow. There were old cars, some American, some French, parked neatly in one of the cavernous stables. It appeared Jehan-Claude and his father liked tinkering. Though mildly interesting, I hoped they would be gone by the time we signed. The date for closing was set for two months’ time.

  As we poked around the outbuildings, I saw a large figure lumbering down the stone drive. I continued snooping as the figure approached.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he said, followed by a series of rapidly spoken words jumbled together into an incomprehensible jumble of French. I did manage to catch the words ‘live’ and ‘Pernod’ and ‘Jehan-Claude’

  ‘Bonjour, enchanté.’ Nice to meet you.

  We struggled for a few more minutes, he trying to decipher my patois and I trying to catch a word or two from his rapid-fire speech. Then he asked me a question, which I knew only because his phrasing ended on a slight shift up in intonation followed by a lifted brow.

  ‘Can you show me?’ I suggested.

  I followed Jehan-Claude to the chateau and he pointed vaguely. I gathered that he wanted to take the items in the great hall. There were blankets and tables and chairs and beds and varia from the institution days.

  ‘Does your father want these?’ I asked.

  Jehan-Claude said his father had told him nothing. He had just learned about the sale the day before and wanted to offer his help.

  ‘Yes, please take these things. It would be a great help,’ I said.

  He left and returned shortly with his flatbed truck. He got to work on the main hall with the energy and verve of a young man, although I assumed he was in his early forties, tall with thick salt and pepper hair, strong, well-muscled forearms and trousers pulled up above his belly button. JC cleared the great hall in under an hour. He was, in a word, extraordinary.

  I offered him a drink of water which he gladly accepted. We stood awkwardly in the gallery thinking of something to say that the other might understand.

  I couldn’t help myself. ‘And the outbuildings? Do you have keys?’

  ‘Yes, I do, but we have many things in the dépendances. I can clear them out later, a few months after you buy the house.’

  Fair enough. Patience was evidently a virtue in France. I was eager to see the buildings because, firstly, I was about to buy the place and secondly, I had plans to rent out the stable master’s house that summer. Bud and I had decided to call it the ‘Guard’s House’, thinking this sounded fancy, like our property would need guarding or had needed guarding at some p
oint.

  Renting out the Guard’s House was part of our assault on the hospitality business in France. After hours spent on the Web, I found a great website with thousands of holiday rentals, ranging from apartments and modest farmhouses to grand chateaux. I quickly reviewed some of the offerings in our area and set about posting our advert on the Internet. The sooner we could make money, the better chance of survival we had.

  I cobbled together a few photos and used an aerial shot from a fairly recent postcard of the chateau. A few more photos of the pond and the woods and we had a bonafide advertisement. I set the rental of the Guard’s House at 5,300 francs (£550) per week, and put together an impressive description: The Guard’s House is rustic but noble, nestled in the heart of 40 acres of woods and a pond. ‘Nestled’ is a word one always finds in these descriptions. And not just any pond, but a pond where you can enjoy fresh spring water in your daily swim. Yes, I could see the cows now on the other side of the pond, wading and drinking and occasionally defecating. I did not mean to mislead my clients. I was just excited about the place.

  A loaded all our information up and waited for the reservations to come rolling in. A faint doubt flickered in the back of my mind as I considered how I had never actually seen the inside of the so-called Guard’s House.

  ‘Sam, you can’t rent that house before you see it,’ Bud admonished.

  ‘Come on, how bad could it be? Let me just set up the advertisement and we’ll see how it goes.’

  ‘That’s not the way to build a business. Everything should be checked and cleaned and we’d better be certain it’s in good order.’ Details, details, I thought. C’est rien. But as any good hotelier would tell you, details are the most important thing in a client’s pleasant stay.

  Within a few days, I had two enquiries, resulting in two bookings from the States and the UK. Each set for two weeks at the end of July, early August. Our first possibility. That was almost 16,000 francs (£1,650) and we hadn’t even begun. We hadn’t even bought the house. What did François know about this business?