The French country house

Magazine Antiques, March, 2001 by Alfred Mayor

Life in the French chateaux continued more or less unchanged by the French Revolution, during which only about twelve hundred members of the nobility were guillotined, leaving the vast majority lying low but alive. The sea change took place during World War II. Until then upstairs and downstairs coexisted as they always had. In the 1930s, for example, grandparents, parents, and children all lived together at the chateau de Beaumanoir in Brittany. The indoor staff of nine consisted of a maitre d'hotel the femmes de chambre of the two ladies, a valet de chambre, a cook, a kitchen maid, a nanny, a governess, and "Miss Agnes" from Ireland, who taught the children English. The governesses ate with the family Below stairs, the maitre d'hotel and the cook presided at opposite ends of the table and were waited on by the others. The cook came to the chateau at the age of nineteen and stayed until she was in her mid-seventies. The twenty-five farms on the estate paid part of their rent in money, part in labor at the ch ateau, and part in kind, supplying most of the needs of the assembled company. This basically feudal method of paying the rent was only outlawed in France in 1945.

The last paragraph in this eminently readable ramble through the upper reaches of French country life makes one want to take the next plane and see for oneself: "The French upper classes are secretive by nature, and fear of burglaries or the tax inspector has made them even more so. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of chateaux still privately lived in, still surviving without the need for commercialization, a whole hidden world of undiscovered contents and life kept vigorously private behind the barriers of that forbidding phrase which keeps the inquisitive at bay: 'On ne visite pas.'"

For the timid or the airsick, this book reveals an elegant sufficiency of those secrets.

Life in the French Country House, by Mark Girouard (Alfred A. Knopf, 800-869-2976). $60.00 (hardcovers).