Chateau de Puymartin

Une Affaire de Famille 

By Anthea Gerrie | Photography courtesy of Chateau de Puymartin

“I’m the Lady Grantham of this chateau,” announces Bernadette, future Comtesse de Charade de Montbron, sweeping up with a hand playfully extended for a kiss—before completely flipping expectations of how a chatelaine should behave by going off to sort our post-prandial coffee.

You could call Chateau de Puymartin, where we have enjoyed a posh private lunch with owners Bernadette and her family, the French Downton Abbey—except for the fact that no butlers or footmen are standing to attention as we rub shoulders with one of the oldest families in France. For these are hands-on working aristocrats—Bernadette runs an interior design shop in the nearby town of Sarlat when not entertaining visitors at the chateau, and her daughter, Marie-Sophie, is devoting her life to making the old pile a leading visitor destination.

For there is a surprising amount of competition here in the Dordogne. We are not in the Loire, more usually associated with fairytale French chateaux, but further southwest, in a less-overrun area of France where many Brits and Americans have made a home. The chateaux here are no less historic—some have been standing nearly a millennium—but in an under-visited area, they have to work harder to earn their keep.

The gorgeous, turreted Chateau de Puymartin is a case in point—built in the fifteenth century, its owners have spent the past fifty years bringing new life to the old pile by opening it up to the public. This includes not just the usual guided tours and events but also getting up close and personal with visitors on occasion, something that rarely happens in British stately homes. Indeed, sharing family secrets with the hoi-polloi would have been anathema to the dowager duchess of television’s Downton Abbey, played as a haughty and hugely class-conscious aristocrat by Maggie Smith.

But although, like the duchess, Bernadette’s grandmother resisted the idea of opening up the chateau, the younger generation had no such qualms: “We really had no choice,” shrugs Bernadette’s nephew Sebastien, who organizes tours for Americans. Now, special events include exclusive private breakfasts before the doors open, at which family members spill family secrets to a handful of VIP guests. “At first, we made a few stories up while we were learning the facts about our history, which we had never really studied,” laughs Bernadette.

A member of one of only five aristocratic families in the area who have held on to their vast properties, she recalls years of vacations at Puymartin before it became her principal home—and shares anecdotes of a very different age. She recounts the 1950s furor caused by the arrival of American cabaret singer Josephine Baker, the newest chatelaine on the block, and a curiosity that extended beyond the fact that she had bought nearby Chateau des Milandes rather than inherited it. “One morning, she arrived unannounced in her white Rolls[-Royce], astounding the butler, who told my grandmother: ‘She’s black!’ She was the first person of color in the area, and despite their differences in style, she and my grandmother became good friends. In fact, grand-mere was very sad when she learned about her problems because she would have taken her into her own home when she lost everything, while other aristocrats in the area ignored her.” 

The story of Chateau des Milandes is a cautionary tale about what can happen when attempts to commercialize one’s home go wrong. Baker, who spent nearly thirty years in the fairytale castle she fell in love with in the ’40s and made a wartime nerve center for her involvement in the French Resistance, was ahead of her time in seeing its visitor potential. She bought up most of the surrounding village and employed 150 people to create the region’s first tourist complex, attracting half a million visitors in the ’50s. However, she was tragically short on the focus and business acumen needed to make a success of the enterprise, with her cabaret career and the twelve adopted children she raised in the chateau making demands on her already divided attention. One of the most moving exhibits at Chateau des Milandes, once again in the hands of the family that owned it for centuries, is a floor-to-ceiling photograph of Baker sitting on the doorstep after she had been evicted; eventually, she had to be dragged away.

“The complex had become a money pit, and despite the support of Brigitte Bardot and Princess Grace, it had to be sold in 1968,” says Angelique de Labarre de Saint-Exupery, who has made the restoration of this exquisite home her life’s work. “When the chateau was auctioned, it was bought by crooks; we are the only owners, since getting it back into our family in 2001, to pay tribute to Josephine Baker and her life here.”

The aristocrat (“I have the title of Countess but never talk about it”), who admired the chateau as a child from her home on the other side of the river Dordogne, received it as a gift from her parents at the age of twenty-five. She took on a house empty of furniture in terrible condition but refused to buy any of the many artifacts looted while Baker was in the throes of being evicted. Instead, she collected authentic memorabilia and costumes and got hands-on with repairs while writing the text for the information panels and audioguides herself. I find her clearing up in the cafe, as she is too busy to play the chatelaine most of the time, “although I do organize a few evenings a year when visitors can meet me in the corner of an alley,” she admits.

If this chateau is the most relatable, with its fabulous Art Deco bathrooms and modern fixtures, more familiar than the ornate canopied beds, heavy chairs, and medieval tapestries that decorate the living quarters of neighboring castles, Chateau de Commarque is the least accessible. It’s a ruin dating back nearly a millennium, albeit a spectacular one to be explored on ladders as well as steps by the fit and not faint-hearted. “When I started uncovering it sixty years ago when it was hidden in the undergrowth, I had no idea I would find such a spectacular building,” says Count Hubert de Commarque, a sprightly 78-year-old who points out the highlights, which include an original twelfth-century tower house, chapel, and great hall. 

There may be no grandly decorated rooms to explore. Still, a ruin can have its advantages—abseiling down the walls of the keep or climbing into a hot air balloon to take in the astounding valley views are unique offerings, as is the chance to view cave paintings—the chateau was built on top of caves dating back to the Neolithic area. A sound and light show is coming this summer. Whatever the activity, the opportunity to rub shoulders with Hubert, whose ancestors were part of the extended French royal family, is an unadvertised free attraction.

You do need a car to get around these remote Dordogne chateaux from the nearest airports—Bergerac or the larger Bordeaux—and unlike Downton Abbey’s visitors, you won’t be invited to sleep in the grand old piles you visit. Perhaps a good thing, given that chateau bedrooms can be spartan by today’s standards. At the same time, the Hotel de Bouilhac in Montignac, a seventeenth-century mansion located near the famous Lascaux caves, has been elegantly updated to suit modern tastes. Its restaurant is overseen by a Michelin-starred chef, bedrooms are equipped with elegant fireplaces and bathroom vanities, and here, at least, there’s a butler type on call to light a fire for you after dinner!

 

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Rooms start from €200 at Hotel de Bouilhac (HoteldeBouilhac.com). For more information on the region, visit Dordogne-Perigord-Tourisme.fr, and for castle activity details, Chateau-Puymartin.com, Milandes.com, and Commarque.com.