The French country house

Magazine Antiques, March, 2001 by Alfred Mayor

Crossing the English Channel, Mark Girouard has produced a sequel to his engrossing study of life in the English country house. He limits his subject to chateaux, excluding royal residences, town houses, parks, gardens, and furnishings. Still, it is evident that there are a very large number of suitable dwellings, which the author appears to know intimately, drawing examples with the apparent ease of Bach composing a fugue.

Chapter 1, "A Quick Run Round the French Noblesse" establishes the marked differences between the French and English aristocracy which, in turn, set the tone for the architecture of the large country establishments in each nation. The fiefdoms of France were established by feuding warriors and formed a patchwork quilt of domains whose masters owed allegiance to a disparate group of others. However, from the smallest seigneur to the most powerful lord, the entire family and their descendants were noble, and, in the eighteenth century at least, awarded themselves the title of their choice. The French nobility is conscious of its apartness to this day. They marry each other and belong to the Association de l'Entraide de la Noblesse Francaise, putting the initials ANF after their names in the Bottin Mondain, the French equivalent of the Social Register. And if they have a castle, a tiny picture of a castle appears after its address.

Estimates of the French noble population in 1789 vary from 135,000 to 340,000, all of them enjoying privileges "similar to, or greater than, those confined in England to holders of peerages, which was 57 people in 1487...and 250 in 1780." None of the French nobility paid taxes, all carried swords, could be tried only by their peers, and alone were allowed to hunt. They sought, and still seek, the boar and the stag "and use a quite different and more ancient language (which English hunters cannot understand, and even find ridiculous), that goes hack to the Middle Ages. The image of the stag haunts the French chateau, inside and out, closely followed by the image of the horse."

Befitting the bellicose origins of the French nobility, the chateau of choice had a moat, round towers, and spires, "all adding up to a recognizable and valued silhouette, with feudal resonances even if without feudal details." These attributes were preserved during seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rebuildings, although the function of various rooms changed with time. The salon, for example, was launched by the Italianate salon at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the marvel designed in the 1650s by Louis Le Vau for Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's minister of finance. By 1673 the salon was accepted as a state room, or chambre de parade, for receptions and banquets. In the next century the salon shrank and its dining function was assigned to another room. Eating became less important than social life in the salon, and by the nineteenth century the word salon took on a separate meaning as a periodic gathering of brilliant conversationalists presided over by what Voltaire called "some woman who offsets the decline of her beauty w ith the shining dawn of her intellect."

The boudoir began as the small room with a dressing table adjoining the bedroom. It evolved into a personal sitting room a writing table and a sofa in a niche. The architect Jacques Francois Blondel decreed in 1735 that "nothing should be neglected to ensure that its decoration is gay and playful. It is here that imagination can take flight and abandon itself to the liveliest fancies." Needless to say, it was a short hop to the mirror-lined sofa niche, a sprinkling of erotic engravings, and a cozy seduction.

The gallery in a French chateau, unlike its counterpart in England, was a private place giving off the chamber where the owner could brood or exercise. Sometimes the gallery led nowhere, and sometimes it led to an estude, or cabinet, which was about the only place in a sixteenth-century chateau that was entirely off limits to servants. It was to her cabinet that Louise de Vaudemont retired to mourn the death of her husband Henri III in 1589. A visitor in 1637, long after Louise de Vaudemont's death, described the room as painted black, "scattered with tears, skulls, tombs and a quantity of mournful emblems.... The only ornament in the entire cabinet was a small portrait of Henry Ill over the fireplace."

As for plumbing, latrines gave way to chamber pots in the sixteenth century, at least for the best people. Bathing was an intermittent affair justified, perhaps, by an observation made in 1624, that "we can do without them [baths] more easily than the ancients, because of our use of linen, which nowadays keeps the body clean more conveniently than was possible by means of their etuves [steam rooms] and baths." By the eighteenth century bathing came to be considered an aesthetic and sensual pleasure in both France and England, and bathrooms were often elegantly fitted up. But in the next century in both countries the bare bones approach returned. The difference was that the British developed the S-bend pipe through which to flush away toilet waste, but as Girouard states diplomatically, "the triumph of the water-closet did not extent to France, or at least to French chateaux." In the 1960s, for example, when the English wife of the vicomte de Baritault came to the chateau de Roquetaillade, earlier restored by Viollet-le-Duc, she found one bathroom, no water closets, and sixty chamber pots.