Wishing You Were Here

If you think that this beautifully produced, sumptuously illustrated book is for coffee tables only, think again. Anyone who begins to turn its pages will want to look at the pictures, then at their legends, then at a text that is easy to read, come-hitherish in its fluency, impressive in the expertise and lucidity of the author and precious for the light it sheds on the evolution of sentiment, taste and social relations in the France of the last millennium.

Mark Girouard begins with castles: primitive keeps at first, then increasingly sophisticated and, as the centuries pass, decreasingly fortified. When is a castle not a castle? When it becomes a country house--manor, gentilhommiere, more generally and simply a cha^teau--while often retaining the identifying marks of a fortified stronghold: moat, walls, crenelations, towers, spires, a chapel. The fortifications might have been put to use in one of the civil wars that died down only around the mid-17th century. But even with no foe to fend off, they marked a lord’s country seat, his power or at least his conspicuous consumption.

There were lords aplenty. As Girouard tells us, estimates of France’s noble population in 1789 vary between 140,000 and 340,000. The number was certainly high, and nobles enjoyed special privileges. They paid no taxes, administered justice on their lands, could be tried only by other nobles and hunted like mad, their horses and hounds and game trampling crops at will. Their pigeons and doves also consumed the peasants’ corn, and bird droppings rich in fertilizing lime were another monopoly of the seigneur. Free-standing dovecotes were one particular symbol of the lord’s authority on which the peasant rioters of 1789 focused, massacring privileged pigeons, desecrating their cotes, carting away the guano to fertilize their fields.

Dovecotes may have toppled, but as long as the castle stood, its attendant farmyard persisted on flank or in the rear: the basse-cour (literally, “the lower yard”) crowded with peasants, servants, merchants and mercenaries. Crucial in subsistence economies, this was a lower world of barns, byres, poultry houses, sheep pens, piggeries, pigeon lofts, wine presses, bakeries, free-standing kitchens and wells, not forgetting the stables, whose equine occupants were often better housed than humans.

The greater among humans--nobles, clerics--adopted an approach more suited to their rank and crossed the spacious forecourt known as the court of honor to reach the grand staircase and the assertive hall, their scale and splendor touchstones of power and riches. Medieval and early modern castles were centers of military, legal, judicial, economic and family units fueled by goods, services, money and men at arms; halls remained centers of castle activity for a long, long time. It was in the great hall, until the mid-18th century, that tenants offered tribute in kind and vassals renewed their vows of fealty, “bareheaded, without sword or spurs, kneeling” with their hands between those of the seigneur. It was there that the lord and his knights feasted and got plastered, though food must have been lukewarm at best after being carried from kitchens faraway.

Often magnificent, halls were short on comfort, the tapestries more sumptuous than the furniture, the fireplace barely sufficient to heat the high table, the most massive appointment a dresser to display the plate. Furniture was spare and above all mobile, food was dished out on planks that were set on trestles, movable benches and stools provided seating, bedding was as easily rolled up as it was unrolled. Into the 16th century or the 17th, while these conditions lasted, the hall served as courtroom, playground, dormitory and ceremonial site. Cases were tried there, minstrels sang, jongleurs juggled, tales were told and dancers hoofed it while the young skylarked and dogs snuffled through the straw for food, before knights, visitors and attendants bedded down for the night.

Specialization accompanied growing sophistication. Specific rooms for dining and for sleep were set apart slowly in the 16th and 17th centuries. But interior design reflected less practical concerns than new relations, sensibilities, expectations. Galleries began to be built where one could stroll, exercise or reflect--especially in lousy weather. Small cabinets and studies permitted private retreats, invited intimacy. More or less sumptuous, paneled and decorated, by the 16th century these had become a must of lordly mansions, along with secretaries--confidential keepers of the master’s secrets. Privacy encouraged or allowed reflection. Girouard points out that the verb re^ver (to dream) originally meant to rave, or spin idle fancies. By the 17th century it had come to stand for daydreaming and letting the imagination run free, as in re^verie. And to spur reveries, a new architectural feature, the balcony, allowed one to walk out of a room through what we now call French windows, to commune with nature in the fresh air.

That’s when halls turned into salons devoted less to carousing and more to conversations: not hierarchy on display or power or greed, but minds interacting over readings, gossip, the exchange of views and all kinds of good talk. This had begun in alcoves beside a lady’s bed and continued in more spacious quarters presided over by a hostess with her own reception day: the jour. Temples dedicated to new civilities, salons and other new-style rooms, were delicately decorated, none more than the supremely intimate, charmingly stylish boudoir. Literally “pouting” or “sulking” rooms, boudoirs were made less for sulking than for seduction--witness the sensual paintings by Francois Boucher and Jean Fragonard, the poufs (ottomans), chaises longues and newfangled bidets. Salons and boudoirs were comfortably furnished for their social functions with armchairs, sofas and that once-exceptional luxury the mirror, lots of mirrors. So the impressive splendors hitherto reserved for public spaces were shifting to more private places or opening to gardens; while gardens, with the intricate patterns of their fountains and parterres, continued the internal display.

Much of this evolution can be credited to jumped-up financiers--capitalists of all sorts who made enough money in trade, speculation or state offices to buy noble titles, the lands and the stateliness that went with them. As the 18th century ended, one-third of noble families had attained that rank since 1700, two-thirds since 1600. Like the Arouets, whose modest domain turned them into de Voltaires, like the Huots whose Lorraine estate turned them into de Goncourts, thousands of commoner families acquired noble rank, joined the Second Estate (the First Estate was the clergy) and went on to live nobly, avoiding demeaning work and enjoying dignified leisure in a countryside that the influence of England, and later of Rousseau, brought into fashion. The fad for country living then spread into the yard with aviaries, hothouses, winter gardens and ornamental dairies. Marie Antoinette’s toy hamlet, the hameau beside the Petit Trianon where the queen and her ladies simulated a pastoral setting complete with beribboned lambs, is the stage set of a basse-cour that has become a plaything.

The hameau is symbolic. Girouard compares cha^teaux and their rooms to stage sets: not an inappropriate simile when professional and amateur theatricals enlivened many a house party and country house dramatics inspired the building of permanent and semi-permanent theaters in many a great house. He might have mentioned that, in 1783, while Louis XVI’s disapproval kept Pierre Beaumarchais’ “Marriage of Figaro” off the Paris stage, the subversive play acted by the king’s own troupe was put on for the king’s brother in a chateau very near Versailles.

But though country houses offered varied amenities, they lacked one source of comfort: Witness Girouard’s chapter called “Plumbing--or the lack of it.” Latrines, often with multiple seats and shafts that emptied into ditch or moat, had been plentiful since the 14th century. By the 17th century these primitive privies were being replaced by chamber pots and by close stools--the latter a status symbol, seated upon which princes, especially princes, would receive visitors, who often might relieve themselves on stairs or in the gardens. Water closets seeped in from England in the 18th century, some with lovely rococo designs; but Girouard reflects that “the triumph of the water closet did not extend to France, or at least not to French cha^teaux, and bathrooms were even less in evidence.” With pipes expensive to install and sewers even more costly, running water reached most country houses only after the first decade of the 1900s. Laundry was done once or twice a year, which meant vast stores of linen but also pungent smells. Few French washed much, fewer bathed (an emollient experience), none sent clothes to cleaners. Because many gentlemen and plenty of pretty ladies reeked of sweat, dogs and horses, strong perfumes and pretty posies held close to the nose had to contend with ambient stinks.

Horses and hunting, on the other hand, continued to be of first importance. This meant that, as shooting dogs had quarters and valets of their own, stables also became palaces endowed with harness rooms, riding schools and enclosed courts for washing and mounting horses. These facilities also enjoyed better water supplies than the cha^teaux they served, which seems fair enough since horses drank water, their riders mostly wine. But unheard-of modes of transport were about to replace courser and cob. One of Girouard’s marvelous illustrations shows a steam-driven car around 1880, only slightly bulkier than an SUV, complete with the stoker whose title of chauffeur would pass to drivers of automobiles. Horseless carriages smelled no worse than horses and covered more ground faster, in greater comfort. Couriers aside, it could take a day to cover 20 miles. As roads improved (and railroads multiplied), getting from country to town and vice versa became easier, and gentlefolk who once shuttled between cha^teau and winter quarters in nearby towns--Orleans, Bordeaux or Aix--found the capital more accessible; more attractive too.

Although provincial towns declined, country seats flourished. Of 560 cha^teaux in the Sologne, south of Orleans, two-thirds were rebuilt between 1800 and 1914, with newfangled billiard rooms, smoking rooms, forced air heating, plate glass windows and sometimes carpeting. Because the French upper classes were poorer than the English, modernity still seldom extended to plumbing or to facilities related to it. Gas lighting remained virtually unknown, as did electricity for decades into the 20th century. Candles and paraffin lamps mostly ruled unchallenged. Chateau life in the 1930s, concludes Girouard, was not very different from that lived in the 1760s. Nor for most has it improved much since.

When the Duc de Lorges married in 1932, a photograph showed the happy couple surrounded by 28 estate staff; but that was before the Depression, which hit France later than other countries. On the whole, the 20th century brought inflation; rising taxes, wages and costs of upkeep; dwindling assets; and sharper assaults by burglars faced with wilting personnel. Derelict or decaying buildings were given up or recycled into golf clubs, hotels, bed and breakfast inns, retirement homes and clinics. Some were demolished. Others were sold to foreigners; turned into museums open to the paying public; rented out for concerts, conferences, weddings. A few developed son-et-lumiere shows. Yet many listings in the “Bottin Mondain,” the country’s social register, still carry the small symbol of a castle tower after the address, to show that the family holds on to its cha^teau and lives in it. Like them or not, Girouard’s magic book has paid them and their forebears a fine tribute.

After the plaudits, one cavil. I counted more than 30 errata, most of them minor, a few more serious. In 350 pages one expects some errors; but a steady trickle distracts, irritates and raises doubts about the competence of author or editor, their command of the relevant languages, their interest in the subject treated. Most of the clinkers could have been avoided by the informed copy editing that a book like this deserves and that American publishers usually practice.