THE REVELATION OF CASTILLE

*DC with Renoir’s* Venus Victrix *at the front door of the Château de Castille*

The approach to the château, up a short, colonnaded drive, was nothing if not theatrical. Besides concealing two ranges of tumbledown farm buildings, these colonnades were part of an elaborate trompe l’oeil effect. The columns decreased in scale and converged, thereby accentuating the perspective—“just like Borromini’s prospettiva in the Palazzo Spada,” Douglas observed to Basil. This gave the relatively cramped entry a decidedly imposing air. Through the bars of a large, padlocked gate we had our first glimpse of what was to be our house: a moderate-sized building with a turret at each corner and yet another sandstone colonnade running around three sides of it so as to form a balustraded balcony. Incised repeatedly into the balustrade was a large monogram, C.R. (for Castille Rohan, we later learned). “It stands for Cooper/Richardson,” I said. “We have to get it.” “If I buy the place,” Douglas said, “I’ll buy it for myself.” His acquisitive heart was evidently set on it.

The oxblood shutters looked as if they had been shut tight for centuries, except for one on the ground floor that was slightly ajar: chickens wandered in and out. A mangy hound on a long chain did not bark so much as howl at us, at which a slatternly woman emerged from the house, making angry fuck-off gestures. No, we could not visit the château. Douglas brandished a banknote at her. Yes, she would unlock the gate. Apart from weeds, the courtyard consisted of an elaborate jeu de buis (box garden), which was so overgrown that it was unclear whether it had started life as a maze or simply developed into one. Off to one side of the château, overlooking what had once been a formal garden, was a long, tumbledown building with columns at either end, which looked as if it might have been an orangery. It turned out to have been a magnaneraie, a place where silkworms had been reared.

*View of Castille and its peristyle from the road*

This, the slattern told us, was the Château de Castille, known locally as “le palais des mille colonnes.” The building had apparently originated in the fifteenth or sixteenth century as a fortified bastide. Shortly before the Revolution, the owner, Gabriel-Joseph Froment, Baron de Castille, had made a grand tour of Italy and had returned to France so enamored of columns that he set about “columnising” his ancestral home in honor of his marriage to a Princesse de Rohan. To judge by a paltry little monument to her in the wooded park at the back of the house, inscribed with the lines “elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses / l’espace d’un matin,” his wife did not live very long, but her widower continued to squeeze every last drop of glory out of this illustrious alliance. Another of the baron’s sentimental little monuments turned out to be of special interest to Basil: it celebrated the visit to Castille of the elderly Louise de Stolberg, the unfortunate wife of Bonnie Prince Charlie (also known as “The Young Pretender”). Basil’s interest stemmed from a historical obsession with the five-year period when this anything-but-“bonnie” prince was on the run from the French as well as the British. Somehow or other, “Our Lord” had discovered the aliases, addresses, and mistresses that the fugitive had used, and solved the mystery of his disappearance.

*The Doric dining room at Castille, ca. 1970*

Another banknote induced the sullen-looking woman and her sullen-looking, peg-legged husband to open the shutters and let us inside the château. Thanks to a roof that had remained in good repair, the fabric of the building was dry and less ruinous than we had feared. Surprisingly, there were no cellars, not even any proper foundations. And since most of the floorboards downstairs had either been burned or stolen or allowed to rot, the chickens pecked away at earthen floors. The rooms, which opened one into the other, turned out to be modest in scale, provincial Louis XVI in style, with good simple moldings and chimney pieces and plafonds à la française (multi-beamed ceilings) in good shape.

Mercifully, the walls were not paneled or otherwise embellished—the better for hanging paintings—except for one dramatic little room that seemed imbued with the spookier, more romantic spirit of the Enlightenment—the spirit that had inspired so many other neoclassical follies of the period. Years later I read about the Marquis de Montesquieu’s allegorical park at Mauperthuis (destroyed during the Revolution), with its Masonic pyramid, its ruined tower that evoked the Knights Templars, mythic ancestors of Freemasonry, and its paths that signified the successive ordeals Masons had to undergo, and I realized that the Baron de Castille had been out to do something similar—albeit more crudely and on an infinitely smaller scale—in his little park at the back of the château. Topographical engravings done in the baron’s lifetime seem to bear out that the miniature pyramid and other numinous relics derive from Freemasonry.

Further evidence of Masonic derivation took the form of an amateurish painting on the ceiling of one of the smaller rooms—a view of the château afloat in a starlit sky—which reminded me ever so faintly of Schinkel’s decor for Mozart’s Masonically inspired Magic Flute. This curious chamber, constructed of the same sandstone as the columns outside, took the form of a small but massive Doric temple. Had the architecture been less rustic and more grammatically correct, it could have been by that other Freemason, Ledoux. This miniature temple, which would become our dining room, would have made a most appropriate setting for the meetings of a secret society (the Baron de Castille would surely have been a friend of his neighbor, the Marquis de Sade), or for the ordeals by fire and water that Mozart’s wretched Tamino had to endure. Later, when I mentioned the possibility of a Masonic concept to Douglas, he was indignant. Insofar as his father had ever worked after leaving the army, it was to the greater glory of Freemasonry, and he had reached a position of eminence in his lodge. Freemasonry was anathema to Douglas. “At a very early age,” he said, “I made it very clear to my vile father that I was not going to waste my time strutting around in an apron. I cannot believe that the geniuses of the Enlightenment went in for any of that middle-class hocus-pocus.”

There turned out to be a major problem with the house: no water, hence no bathroom, lavatory, or kitchen sink—not a tap in the place. The slatternly woman, who was called Madame Grousset, showed us the only well; it’s always running dry, she explained with relish. There had been several wells on the property, but these now belonged to her family. The Baron de Castille’s descendants had apparently been a feckless lot who had allowed the family fortune, such as it was, to dwindle to nothing. Around 1930 the bank had foreclosed, and the Groussets had bought up all the land that was under cultivation, as well as the wells that went with it, and the scruffy farm buildings down by the road, where they now lived. These included a little chapel—a pretext for more of the baron’s columns—which they used as a barn. A local businessman had bought the “useless” part of the property: the château, colonnades, outbuildings, and pocket-sized wooded park at the back. He had intended to restore it and sell it at a profit, but all he had time to do before war intervened was repair the roof. During the war a family of Polish refugees had moved in and kept sheep and goats in the little Doric chamber. By rubbing their itchy flanks against the friable stone columns, the animals had transformed more than one entasis into a concavity. The For Sale sign had gone up a year or two after the war, and Madame Grousset had become the concierge. Since the château was going very cheap, for ten to twelve thousand dollars, several people had shown an interest, but lack of water had precluded a sale.

As we emerged from the shade of the colonnaded house into the glare of sunlight and the blare of cicadas, Douglas announced that he was going to buy it. “Ghastly, philistine England” had never deserved his collection and now would never get it. His pictures would be much more at home in life-enhancing France, where most of them had been painted. Castille would be far more conducive to writing about modern art than Knightsbridge. And then think of the basse cour we would have—pigs, chickens, sheep, rabbits would provide pâtés, hams, eggs, cheeses…. Basil looked put out—hadn’t he just bought a house in London to share with Douglas?—until we cheered him up by explaining that Castille would serve the three of us as a kind of Egerton Terrace South. Also, since he was a baron and Castille a barony, Basil could be “Our Baron” as well as “Our Lord.” As for water—no problem. As soon as the sale went through, we would simply dig a new well; the river Gardon was nearby, so water would have to be available. “Don’t worry,” said Douglas, who was optimistic only when pessimism was called for, “we’ll go on digging till we find it. If the worst comes to the worst and no water materializes, I will put the château back on the market and take a loss.”

It was not, of course, as simple as that. In those postwar days there were severe restrictions regarding currency and the export and import of works of art. Moreover, French red tape proved even worse than the British variety. Douglas spent most of the next week seeing local lawyers or telephoning London ones. We were lucky in that I had an old friend in the neighborhood, Lauretta Hugo, sister of London’s last greenery-yallery dandy, Felix Hope Nicolson—“the Squire of Chelsea,” as he came to be known. Lauretta, who was as tall and statuesque as one of Picasso’s classical goddesses, had married Victor Hugo’s great-grandson and was in the process of bearing him numerous children. Jean Hugo was a tall, famously seductive patriarch with white hair en brosse, eyes as commanding as Casanova’s, and a fondness for those wide-wale corduroy suits that artists like Courbet and Cézanne used to wear. His exquisitely crisp and delicate watercolors of Provençal life deserve to be much better known than they are; likewise his no less crisp and delicate memoirs. Jean and his ever-increasing family lived some thirty miles to the west of Castille at Lunel in the sprawling, romantic Mas de Fourques, where he produced a delicious dessert wine, Muscat de Lunel, which had been a favorite of Louis XIV. Alas, the family no longer makes it.

*Picasso standing on a chair to kiss Lauretta Hugo in front of his 1909* Nude Woman in an Armchair

Jean dispensed hospitality in the seigneurial style of his forebears. Disdaining the weekend as a vulgar, modern concept, he urged his friends—among them Cocteau and Bérard, Marie Bell and Louise de Vilmorin—to settle into Fourques for weeks or months at a time. Jean Bourgoing, the inspiration for one of Cocteau’s doomed Enfants Terribles, stayed for years until he finally became a Trappist. Tramps were never turned away, but fed in the kitchen and bedded down in one of the barns. Cocteau, who spent part of the war at Fourques, told me he once found a gigantic tramp installed in one of those miniature cottages known as “Wendy houses,” where children play at being grown-ups. The tramp looked like Gulliver, Cocteau said: one foot stuck out of the front door, the other out of a window. Smoke rose from the chimney; he was baking a hedgehog in the little grate.

I had never been to Fourques before, and was intrigued by the antiquity of the modern conveniences: for instance, Jean’s Model T Ford, which was about to function again, courtesy of one of Henry Ford II’s wives, who had commandeered the necessary spare parts from the museum at Dearborn. Oil lamps looked anything but out of place in the chintz-hung bedrooms lined with Victor Hugo’s demonic drawings. The bathrooms dated back at least a hundred years: antique geysers fueled with sarments de vigne that terrified me as much as they would have kindled the spirit of a pyromaniac. I loved the moment at dusk when there was a sudden strange din as of flags or sails unfurling and, one after another, the peacocks would fly up into the great cedar tree to roost. Traditionally, the garden of every Provençal mas swarmed with peacocks. “They will destroy your roofs and decimate your garden,” Jean said, “but if you are going to live at Castille, you have to have them.” And so he had his gardener catch a male and some peahens for us so that we could start up our own flock. Within a couple of years we had a horde of them, much to the delight of Douglas, who seemed to identify with their shrieks and showing off and wanton havoc. Grousset, the one-legged farmer who lived at the bottom of our drive, regarded them as vermin and set his dog on them. The dog killed one peahen, wounded another, and slaughtered ten chicks. Jean duly replaced them.

Dinners at Fourques were as ceremonious as they would have been a century earlier. If a priest was present—and one often was—grace would be said. Certain other precepts had to be observed: that nobody should ever rise from the table during a meal was the most stringent. Telephones could ring, children scream, peristalsis strike: you had to stay put. Jean would never even rise to his feet to carve the massive roasts—a gigot supplied by the shepherd, a goose from the farm, very occasionally a peacock from the garden—which were set in front of him. He would deftly slice them sitting down. One evening, Basil, the Hugos’ mad Russian chef, raced into the dining room brandishing a knife. Nobody stirred. “I’m afraid he’s b-been at the v-vodka again; he’s p-perfectly harmless. The B-Bolsheviks were absolutely b-bloody to him.” Lauretta’s breathless stutter never sounded more reassuring.

Basil turned out to be more dangerous than anyone had thought. One day in December 1956, Lauretta telephoned to say that he had had an attack of homicidal mania. He had tried to kill the housekeeper, but Jean had overpowered him. Somehow Basil had wriggled free, climbed onto the roof, and tried to throw himself off. Once more he was overpowered; once more he escaped, and tried to kill Jean, who again managed to get the upper hand. Meanwhile, an ambulance had arrived, but before it was possible to force him into a straitjacket, Basil had run off yet again. He was finally found, stark naked in a flower bed, jabbing himself with a knife, and apprehended. “We can’t p-possibly have him back,” Lauretta said, “so I have to do all the c-c-cooking.”

*The forecourt of Castille, seen from the balcony*

Jean opened a lot of local doors to us. So would his Amazonian sister, Maggie, who had another great property closer to the Camargue; and his half-brother François, the silversmith, who would later (at Douglas’s and my behest) do a line of silver dishes for Picasso; also François’s Italian ex-wife, the beautiful Maria de Gramont, who used to tell us how wretched she had been as a duchess, and how she had scandalized Paris by going to a fancy dress ball, when in mourning, all in black, as John the Baptist’s executioner, with Jean Hugo and the Prince de Chimay in drag as Herodias and Salome.

Everyone seemed to know about Castille and wanted to help us restore this “sleeping beauty” to life. And not just the locals, either. Diana Cooper told me that she and her husband, Alfred Duff Cooper, had thought they might buy the château and retire there. Douglas soon found important strings to pull; as usual he would pull on some of them so hard they snapped. Our most powerful connection was with the local senator, Suzanne Crémieux, a handsome woman of great allure and down-to-earth good sense, who had been born a few miles from Castille. Suzanne and her newspaper-owning husband, Robert Servan-Schreiber, owner of L’Express and a financial journal called Les Echos, had established themselves at the Château de Montfrin, most stately of neighboring houses. And it was there that we met all the wheeler-dealers of the department of the Gard. For many years Suzanne had been the égerie of the Socialist Party, also, supposedly, the mistress of various prime ministers and presidents—hence her vast clout. She took the cause of Castille to heart, and was a tremendous help with local authorities. Douglas adored Suzanne, and because he was slightly in awe of her, he behaved impeccably when she was around. We also had a very good time with her brilliant daughter, Marie-Claire, but saw much less of her after she followed her mother’s political bent and married a former prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France. With Suzanne on our side Douglas felt much more sanguine about the project, and we went back to London to await the closing.

A month or two later we returned to sign papers, apply for residence permits, and comply with other formalities. As soon as the house was ours, we sent for the local dowser. His little stick got very excited conveniently near the kitchen. “No problem,” he said. “Dig here and you’ll find all the water in the world.” No problem? After a few days’ work, the puisatier, the well digger, had to be brought to the surface, asphyxiated: all he had discovered was carbonic gas. There was a further problem: the local village was called Argilliers for the good reason that the neighborhood was situated on a layer of argille (clay) of unknown depth. We would not find water, we were told, until we reached the aquifer below the clay. Our best bet was to drill an artesian well—something that nobody in the locality had done. Lightning struck the drilling equipment twice, but at ninety-six meters—just within the hundred-meter limit that we had set ourselves—we reached the aquifer and found enough water to supply two villages. We immediately set about making plans for the restoration of the house. Estimates from masons, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, poured in. How about a fountain? I asked. Douglas snarled.

In his enthusiasm for all things French, Douglas had assumed that this unspoiled valley of the Gardon would abound in traditionally trained craftsmen—gifted local artisans who would look and talk and carry on as earthily as characters out of a Marcel Pagnol movie. No such luck. Apart from ourselves, few outsiders had as yet chosen to settle in this backward neck of the woods, let alone rebuild a tumbledown château, so there was little demand for any but the most basic construction work carried out in cheap, ugly materials. To replace weathered Roman roof tiles, we had to go to antique shops: the ones from the local tuilerie were too garish and low-tech to use. Same with the hardware. In the wake of the war, the English had adopted the inappropriate word “utility” to denote the poor-quality, badly designed things we were obliged to use. French products were not even up to “utility” standards. When the mistral set doors and shutters slamming, bolts and doorknobs would rattle to the floor. The craftsmen to whom we entrusted the run-of-the-mill restoration work did their sheepish best, but, as Douglas liked to point out, their best was not something in which they, or for that matter their clients, could take the slightest pride. We warmed to the gnarled old rogue of a carpenter: “At least he looks the part,” Douglas said. “Let’s hope he knows his trade.” But when the beams in a new ceiling started to sag because they were made of unseasoned wood, the carpenter had to go.

Shortage of money was another problem. Currency regulations compounded Douglas’s tightness. True, he sold his only nineteenth-century painting, a beautiful Courbet of a sleeping woman, as well as his only old master, a French primitive of Saint Roch, to raise extra funds. But he still insisted that we keep costs to a minimum. Since there was no question of selling any of the cubist pictures, I suggested that Douglas take out a bank loan, the better to do justice to this handsome house. Against his principles, he said. I had to fight to get inexpensive, local stone (pierre de Vers) instead of “terrazzo” tiles for the salon floor, but was unable to persuade Douglas to buy anything but the cheapest appliances: rickety plastic shower stalls, a water heater better suited to a bungalow, a refrigerator fit for a doll’s house, and, worst of all, a fortissimo toilet that was plugged to the hear-through floor above my study. I did not mind showing guests the not very comfortable chambres d’amis, as they were filled with Klees, Légers, and Mirós, but I was ashamed of the one and only guest bathroom, which looked as if it cost even less than it did. Douglas had decreed that central heating could wait, so for the first years we had to depend on coke stoves, which required constant tending and were no match for the mistral.

Douglas likewise economized on the decor. If in the end the rooms had an unpretentious, low-key look that worked with the paintings, it was because I had scoured the junk shops of Avignon and Nîmes for bargains and come up with massive bits of simple provincial furniture of the same period as the columns. I paid for a few of the things, but my funds were limited. Apart from a tiny trust fund from my father, which brought in around $500 a year, the pittance I earned doing prefaces to art books and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement was all I had. This was just enough to cover my personal expenses and help out my mother, not enough for me to contribute to the running of Castille. That would be Douglas’s responsibility. If I had had the money, I would have splurged on a set of twelve enormous, eighteenth-century pots d’Anduze (glazed terra-cotta urns) complete with fully grown orange trees. They cost “nothing”—two hundred dollars each—and would have made the whole difference to our wilderness of a garden. I begged Douglas to buy them. “Certainly not, I’m only buying things I regard as necessities,” he said. But give him his due. When he splurged, he splurged with a vengeance. From one of Ambroise Vollard’s heirs he bought Renoir’s great, life-size bronze, Venus Victrix, to put outside the front door. Nearsighted locals spread a story that we had a black maid who went naked.

We spent most of the winter of 1950–51 at the Magnaneraie, a modest, family-run hotel with a garden on the outskirts of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, a half hour’s drive from Castille. Out of season there were very few visitors; it was quiet, and we had the place more or less to ourselves. The rooms were spacious, but the food was simple without being at all good. One day we found a small, newly opened restaurant called La Petite Auberge, a few kilometers away at Sauveterre on the Rhône. The owners, a retired businessman and his wife, were determined to fulfill a fantasy of running a three-star restaurant, and they devoted all their resources and energies to this end. Although their food was sublime, their clientele was as yet minimal. To help keep their business going, we arranged to have all our dinners there. Night after night, the young chef would try out his repertoire of dishes on us; night after night, the restaurant remained virtually empty. Even Douglas was touched. Fortunately, the proprietors’ perseverance would soon be rewarded. Within a year or two they got their first star in Michelin; then they moved to larger premises and were awarded even more stars. Fifty years later, La Petite Auberge at Noves is one of the most celebrated restaurants in the region. I still look back on our exquisite dinners with gratitude. They compensated for the freezing days we had to spend in the mud and mess of Castille, supervising the endlessly frustrating travaux.

Moving house is said to be one of the most traumatic things in life, but to give Douglas his due, he was remarkably patient with me; he took his rage out on everybody else. Successive sparring partners included the patron of our hotel, who could not abide him, the mason who failed to lay a stone floor to our specifications, the postmistress who supposedly listened to our calls, and most of all the “ghastly peasants,” who had temporarily replaced the “ghastly English” as targets for his rage. And it is true, the “ghastly peasants” were difficult, but how could Douglas expect them to be anything else? From the very start he had treated them as if they were his serfs, hectoring them about their hens, accusing them of poaching rabbits in our little wood, telling them where to park their farm vehicles, claiming that the driveway down to the road belonged to him and not them. The ongoing feud over ownership of the drive ultimately culminated in a lawsuit, which solved nothing and made matters much, much worse. Far from trying to defuse this resentment, Douglas derived an infantile kick out of exacerbating it. Rightly or wrongly, he attributed the narrowness and suspiciousness of the locals to their Cathar ancestors, fundamentalist heretics who had imposed their joyless doctrines (three lents a year, and the notion that matter is evil and man an alien sojourner in an evil world) on much of this area some seven hundred years earlier. “Too bad the Inquisition is out of business,” Douglas once said. “There are a lot of heretics I’d like to burn.” I, on the other hand, was terrified of these inimical people. I would anxiously try to placate them with nervous nods and smiles, which were acknowledged laconically, or with a gob of spit in the dust.

*View of Castille from the surviving section of the peristyle*

My fears were not entirely without cause. A summer or two after our arrival, a ritual murder had caused panic in the neighborhood. An adventurous English couple called Drummond, with two young children, had gone camping in a particularly primitive area of la haute Provence. They had set up their tent half a mile or so outside a small village. Needing water, the father had gone to the local well, but had been refused access by the villagers. After an altercation, he had returned with a bucket and helped himself. For this offense against the community, a village patriarch called Dominici decreed that the Drummonds be ritually killed. Dominici and his sons were soon apprehended, tried, and convicted in a cause célèbre at Aix-en-Provence. The Dominici affair left me very scared. Childish, I know, but as I saw it, Douglas was far guiltier than the unwitting Drummonds of offenses against local susceptibilities, and might well bring vengeance down on our heads. As long as I lived at Castille, I was terrified of this atavistic malevolence, which had never, it seemed to me, been entirely exorcised. On returning home, I was always in dread of finding the guard dog poisoned or the house on fire, or, as happened after I left, the place burgled. And then there would be the time Douglas was stabbed almost to death in the hills above Nîmes. I don’t believe I ever spent a night alone in the house.

In the course of this endless winter, we returned to London more than once to make inventories and supervise the packing of Douglas’s paintings and books as well as some bits and pieces and family things that I had accumulated. Douglas had even relented and acquired a few goodish pieces of furniture—notably an imposing suite of white and gold Empire chairs and sofas—in keeping with Castille. It was also necessary to help Basil with replacements for the numerous works from Douglas’s collection, which had left his walls in a shambles. The handsome Braque still life, Monet harbor scene, early Matisse interior, and 1908 Picasso nude that we found seemed to appease him. Basil behaved with his accustomed saintliness, and showed no sign of the resentment he must have felt.

There was one tedious formality with which both Douglas and I had to comply—for our sake as well as the French nation’s. We had to go to the French consulate to have our inventories stamped “import temporaire.” This meant that for the next fifty years Douglas and I would have the right to take our works of art and other possessions in and out of France as we chose, without paying export taxes or risk having things blocked by the greedy Musées Nationaux. Import temporaire was of little significance so far as my things were concerned, but of vast importance to Douglas, as it would allow him to move his paintings around and sell them if he wanted to. In 1949 the collection was already worth around $10 million, but today, judging by the $200 million fetched by the far smaller Ganz collection in 1998, it would be worth almost half a billion.

Twenty-five years later, Douglas’s vainglorious pride would bring about the very thing he most feared: the cancellation of the import temporaire arrangement, despite the consular guarantee. Douglas would trigger this disaster by pressing an important friend of his, Michel Guy, to visit Castille. This was tempting fate: Guy was Minister of Culture, and in France, sensible collectors are apt to conceal their treasures before letting the Minister of Culture into the house. Douglas showed Guy everything he had, and, sure enough, the minister was so impressed by the sheer size and quality of the collection that on his return to Paris he promptly and most unfairly arranged to have the half-century dispensation, which foreign residents had hitherto enjoyed, reduced to twenty-five years.

That was the end of the friendship with Michel Guy. Douglas switched his rage from England to France. And he forthwith embarked on a campaign to get the new regulation—“aimed specifically at me, my dear”—rescinded, at least in his case. According to Douglas, this could be arranged only if he donated the rarest and most valuable of his Picassos, the great 1907 Nudes in the Forest—the equal of which did not exist in France—to the as yet unopened Musée Picasso. Douglas reluctantly agreed to this quid pro quo arrangement, but it soon unraveled. Douglas went and wrote one of his famous lettres d’injures to his new friend President Pompidou, saying in effect how much he regretted relinquishing the most precious of his pearls to the swine in charge of the museum—swine to whom Pompidou promptly forwarded his letter. It would be up to Douglas’s heir to renegotiate the deal.