Castles With Too Much Overhead
Inherited French Chateaux Move Beyond the Means of Their Owners

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 28, 2006

BOUCARD, France -- When this village's fairy-tale chateau is viewed from afar, with its seven slender spires and fortress-like bearing, it is easy to imagine the genteel, pampered existence of the aristocrats who call it home.

But closer inspection shows that some of the graceful, elongated windows are missing panes, a bridge across the moat has collapsed and tiles are falling off the roof. Inside, pigeon and rodent droppings carpet vast areas that have been surrendered to the elements.

"It is a very heavy load for people who inherit a castle," lamented Marie-Henriette de Montabert, 74, the diminutive, square-shouldered matriarch whose family has owned Chateau de Boucard since 1720. She lives alone on the ground floor of a tower retrofitted with a kitchen, bath and heat. "All of the castle owners have the same problem -- how to save your castle."

For hundreds of years, the French built defensive castles and opulent chateaux, bequeathing the national patrimony an estimated 40,000 of them. Now, the French have a problem.

Time and weather, war and looting, dwindling family fortunes, split inheritances and rising maintenance costs have left the countryside with thousands of eye-popping but decrepit monuments that are beyond the budgets of all but the most fabulously wealthy to maintain.

"Nowadays, a castle is no longer an exterior sign of wealth, but rather an exterior sign of poverty," said Bertrand Le Nail, a French real estate agent and property expert.

About 90 percent of the country's chateaux -- a term that loosely applies to everything from castles to large manor houses -- are not maintained properly because their owners cannot afford it, Le Nail said.

Some sell their properties or turn them into small hotels, some open them to the public and charge entrance fees, and others simply go on living in edifices that are collapsing around them.

Chantal de Bonneval thought she had found the solution when she and her husband inherited his family's 45-room chateau in Thaumiers, about 175 miles south of Paris, in 1977.

Because of the custom of splitting an inheritance, the chateau did not come with the surrounding lands that over the years had provided an income to maintain the building. So the new owners added 13 bathrooms to the existing four, repaired 40 leaks in the roof and turned the chateau into a bed-and-breakfast.

But de Bonneval, 62, discovered that owning a chateau was an all-consuming, lifelong avocation that condemned her to toil and sacrifice. And "as soon as you open it to visitors, it's not your home anymore -- it's a business," she said.

"There are so many things we haven't done while we were here -- cultural things, travel, see the family," she said. Normal maintenance for the chateau, which has been in her husband's family for 300 years, runs about $65,000 a year -- barely covered by the 500 annual guests.

"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.

Back at the Chateau de Boucard, about 100 miles south of Paris in the rural Sancerre wine region, the resident family has considered many options but remains torn about what to do.

The lady of the castle, de Montabert, said selling it was "out of the question." Her son, who is to inherit the chateau, is a veterinarian and could not afford the upkeep, even if he wanted the building, which he doesn't, his mother said. And her two daughters would split the 750 acres surrounding the chateau, depriving it of its income.

Part of the 20-room chateau has been abandoned, part has been restored and is open to the public, and part is used by the family. Because the chateau is a historic monument, the government picks up a portion of the cost of maintenance, but the sheer magnitude of what needs to be done is daunting, according to elder daughter Edwige Mortier.

As for selling the castle when her mother dies, Mortier said: "It's not worth anything. You always need to have work done, and people don't want it." She estimated the chateau could fetch perhaps $500,000.

"I don't see a very bright future," her mother conceded while walking around the chateau's stone courtyard.

A frieze in the center of one wing, built by an exiled military leader who made the chateau his home in the mid-1500s, declares, "Patience wins over destiny."

"It could be a message," de Montabert said. "He must have been thinking of me when he wrote it."

Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.