Castles With Too Much Overhead

"Thirty years ago, my husband said, 'If we get past the year 2000, we've made it.' We did, and things have not changed at all. We put everything into this place for 30 years. We've worked like mad, and it's not possible to go on. We have hit the wall."

Eight months ago, they put the chateau on the market for about $3.75 million, de Bonneval said, a trace of bitterness in her voice.

"What's the use? Should we keep this place for nothing?" she asked. "It's not making my family happy. They can't help it. It's anachronistic to live in a place like this." In the end, she said, "it's better not to leave our children with an enormous problem."

Despite the soaring cost of upkeep, sales of chateaux have boomed in recent decades, as people moved to the cities and urban dwellers began acquiring leisure homes in the country, according to real estate agent Le Nail.

"In our modern societies, they represent stability, beauty, authenticity and a link to our past," he said. "These places have a soul" and can be purchased for as little as $500,000, fueling a rush of foreign investors. "A Briton can sell his four-room apartment in London and buy a chateau in France instead," he noted.

That does not always play well with the neighbors, according to sociologists Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, a husband and wife who have studied the socioeconomic history of chateaux and their owners. Chateaux are repositories of a family's history, and to local residents, the property and the family are often indistinguishable, the couple said. So newcomers may be seen as crass social climbers and shunned.

"The village people think they are pretending to be chateau owners," Pinçon-Charlot said. Some smooth the way by donating money to the local school or church.

Three miles from Chateau de Thaumiers, in Bannegon, three young children in the de Bengy family inherited a different sort of problem when their father died in 1992 and left them a castle dating to the 13th century that had fallen into serious disrepair.

The oldest child, Antoine, then 16, "felt he didn't have the right to sell the patrimony our family has kept throughout generations with lots of sacrifices," said his aunt, Veronique de Bengy. So he formed an association of friends to raise money for repairs and to work on restoring the castle, she said.

Francois D'arrouzat, a business student from Paris and volunteer weekend laborer at the castle, said the restoration began in 1993 and will probably continue for 20 more years, costing as much as $7.5 million upon completion. Roof repairs alone could account for half of that, he said.

"Without the association, we never would have managed to save our roofs," de Bengy said, explaining that part of the property is classified by the government as a historic monument and that restoration requires skilled workers, special materials and numerous permits and inspections, driving up the cost.

Much of the association's funding comes from a medieval festival that the castle stages every summer, complete with a rock concert and a sacking of the castle by 500 revelers in period costumes.