A Castle in the Backyard: The Dream of a House in France

Preface

In 1985, for what it costs these days to buy a midsized car, we bought an old stone house in the hilltop village of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle in the Dordogne Valley of southwest France. The ancient name of this province is Périgord , but after the Revolution, it was renamed the Department of the Dordogne, in honor of the gently winding river that shaped its landscape. This verdant region lies one hundred miles inland from Bordeaux, bordered by the wine country of Bergerac to the west and Cahors to the southeast. It used to be that when Americans thought of France, they thought of Paris, or the Riviera, or perhaps Normandy. With the popularity of Peter Mayle’s charming books, everyone now seems to know Provence as well. But few Americans know the Dordogne. In France, the department is renowned for its walnuts, truffles, foie gras, prehistoric cave paintings, and natural beauty. P R E F A C E In many ways this is still la France profonde, remote and slow to change, despite the influx of Parisians who come camping on their summer holidays. Périgord remains a poet’s inspiration—the Frenchman’s Paradise, Henry Miller called it on a visit between the wars. Flanked by ocher cliffs and unmarred by major highways, the Dordogne Valley glows with the gold of sunflowers set against green swaths of corn and tobacco. The river, wide and sparkling, is constantly visible, flowing through planted fields, by castle keeps, past towns perched on bluffs or ranged along its banks, and on to enter thin poplar woods lying between settlements. Périgord rose to prominence in the Middle Ages during the Hundred Years War, when the Dordogne River marked the battle line between France and England. It was then that most of its great castles were built, churches fortified, and walled villages established, some of them strategic garrisons called bastides, planned around central market places with their streets radiating out from a central grid. The English finally were expelled from the area at the Battle of Castillon in 1453, but the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century between Catholics and Huguenots roiled the valley again with savage fighting. In the following century, agriculture expanded, as did river trade, with barges plying the route between Bergerac and Bordeaux. Yet the Industrial Revolution left Périgord untouched, and the province was poor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, remaining heavily wooded and divided into small tracts and farms. Much of the region’s charm today derives from its rural character. In the medieval village of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, a minor building boom occurred after the Revolution, x p r e fac e when the castle that gives the town its name was nearly demolished. Emboldened farmers and workers seized the castle’s dressed limestone blocks for the construction of their own homes. Perhaps that accounts for the harmonious ensemble of the village today, as it appears to have been built all of a piece out of golden stone. There are 409 inhabitants in Castelnaud, including us. Our cottage fits snugly between its neighbors, perched at the foot of the fortress that used to provide the town’s defense. Over fifteen summers, we have settled in, making friends, exploring the countryside, and learning the local history and cuisine. During that time we have witnessed the transformation of our village from a picturesque cluster of half-deserted houses to a thriving attraction centered on its well-publicized château, which has been converted to a museum of medieval warfare. We recognize that we ourselves are part of the town’s transformation: “les américains,” who (for reasons inexplicable to old-time residents) purchased a home in a country where we have no relatives and who travel thousands of miles each summer to take up housekeeping next to the castle walls. No one in town speaks English, but our French is serviceable , and the richest part of our experience has grown from ties with our neighbors, among them the daughters of the electrician who knock on our door excitedly as soon as we arrive each summer, the local realestate agent who sold us our house and who continues to besot us with homemade wine, and the elderly widow who lived in the village all her life, never saw Paris, and would tell us the tale of her life’s tragedy over and over again, forgetting that we already knew it by heart. x i p r e...