Chateau Envy

intergenerational queer community in the French countryside

The SNCF INTERCITES 3605 train departs from Paris Gare de Austerlitz. It is a local train with stops that include towns like Les Aubrais and Issoudun and terminates in Toulouse.

I’m traveling with my friend from Los Angeles, Ben, who is passing through Paris on his two-week summer vacation, stretching the limits of American PTO in a way that is in fact, quite French.

In just two hours and ten minutes, we arrive in Châteauroux, a town with a reported population of roughly 43,000 in the Indre region of the Loire Valley. Our destination is an additional 25 minute drive West into what is ultimately smack dab in the middle of the country and, incidentally, looks exactly like Kansas.

Slow hills roll over thousands of hectares of land all of which is strictly zoned for agriculture. Rows of sunflowers turn throughout the day, drooping from the weight of seeds ready for harvest, horses graze freely, their tails blowing in the country wind.

Our final destination is Chateau de La Brosse, a 400 year old chateau on 36 hectares (89 acres) in Saint-Lactencin.

The keepers of this castle are John Rupp, a retired American lawyer who has spent the last 25 years painstakingly renovating the property with great care and attention to history, and his partner Kamel, a French man with impeccable taste in architecture and design and who is often caught scrolling through furniture listings on his phone at the kitchen table. John also happens to be Ben’s great uncle-in-law (his uncle’s husband’s uncle, voilà). Originally from Iowa, he feels right at home in the endless, flat expanse of central France.

Many have asked “why” I was at the Chateau, searching for a justification, a wedding, a birthday perhaps, though of course the only appropriate response when invited for a weeklong vacation at a chateau in the French countryside is “why not?”

We drank, we ate, we swam in the half-olympic sized pool. We ate summer salads that would make Ina Garten weep and napped on chaises longues in one of the grand salons designed by Madelaine Castaing.

We made plans to go see neighboring chateaux that were never realized in favor of dancing with the one who brought us.

We hosted dinner parties for their local friends, the school teacher and the florist, the French-Canadian influencers who have just begun renovating their own chateau, and the Deputy Mayor of a neighboring town, Levroux, all of whom are gay.

We dined at their friend's hotel, a gay couple whose restaurant featured a three course meal that was Michelin worthy and they put a candle in my dessert as a celebration for receiving my first payment in euros for work done in France. They told us about the fiscal impact of the global political moment which they feel in the form of fewer reservations and tighter wallets and we drank imported rum from Guadaloupe.

It only took us 24 hours to realize that just two hours south of Paris by train we had stumbled onto what is effectively the Palm Springs of France.

If you’ve ever considered throwing down a couple hundred thousand euros for a chateau that calls to you whilst doom scrolling on Instagram at 2am, I encourage you to find a way to stay in one for any amount of time. Chateaux are, as it turns out, a lot like children—one need only spend a few moments with one to rethink the entire endeavor. They require one’s full attention: constant maintenance, love, and care, and creativity, and above all TONS of money. These are the hidden costs behind the deceptively low sticker prices of manors from a bygone era.

The aristocracy fell and so too did their monuments.

But for those who choose this life, I have come to understand it is much more than a delusional fantasy, it is a calling. Their lives consist of constant tinkering, scrolling resale websites for antique side tables, attending auctions to bid on gilded wall sconces that may or may not have been ripped out of the walls of Versailles during the Revolution. They are interconnected to neighboring chateau owners with whom they share resources and enjoy petty rivalries.

Above all, they are stewards of cultural relics which they are joyously restoring, notably with great support from the French government who benefit from the symbiotic relationship between private and public financing of structures that would—and have up to the point at which they are bought by some wild eyed dreamer—otherwise go neglected.

I awoke every (late) morning to the sounds of workers arriving to trim a hedge, or spackle a wall, the sound of footsteps on gravel just below the window I cracked for a cool breeze while I slept the night before. I passed John in the halls as we crisscrossed from one wing to another and every single time he was carrying a chair, an old lamp, a golden clock he’d just fixed.

He told me he once spent an entire week going from room to room adjusting the time with the intention of synchronizing every clock, an exercise in futility as they all had wildly varying mechanisms, and by the time he reached the end, the first ones had gotten out of sync again. The result was a never ending cacophony of bells and clangs announcing the hour at 9:03 and 11:12 and 2:43 so he gave up and allowed them to remain decorative. As he told me this story we walked past a grandfather clock that rang with a loud gong. He asked me to check my watch, “15 minutes early.” He threw his hands in the air, “see!”

On Tuesday John’s architect arrived to give him a walk through of plans for the stone farm they recently acquired on the other side of their road. It’s a protected building, as they all seem to be in one way or another, and he intends to turn it into another guest house having recently finished a structure that sits a few hundred meters away and which received its first Airbnb guests while we were in residence, a family of 5 from Amsterdam with their black lab.

The architect, a Dutch man named August with a firm based in Paris, walked us around the structure pointing to joists that could go and beams that must stay. And I tried to see what they could see, and marveled at the ceaseless imagination that has not waned in the 25 years that John has been dreaming up possibilities.

The bookshelves arrived halfway through our stay. They were the wrong size but that didn’t deter John from making his self-imposed deadline, “the library will be ready by November.” And I look forward to enjoying it.

What was perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the week though was the community they have built. I admit that country life is not something in which I am particularly well versed. I’ve passed through small towns for periods of time but always as an interloper, as a student, as a weekender, as a wedding guest, but I have never known the joys and challenges of building queer life and community in the country. They all live very different lives, from country cottages plucked out of a Nancy Meyers film to grand chateaux and everything in between, and they come together to support each other, across intergenerational divides that are otherwise challenging to bridge.

On our final night, John and Kamel hosted a 31st birthday for the Deputy Mayor and all of his friends, the majority of whom are Pompiers (firefighters). I wore two different Dôen dresses over the course of the night and learned from a couple of pompiers about the Paris firefighters’ esprit ouvert (open-minded) relationship with sexuality. The Dutch renters joined the party and as I looked for a bottle of white wine for the mother I mentioned to her that I didn’t know what reactions to expect to my sheer lace Dôen coverup. She replied, “Darling I’m from Amsterdam, I’ve seen it all.”

We danced, we drank, we left with a community of new friends in a town that up until a few weeks before I had never heard of.

Ben and I crawled back to Paris with pounding headaches and sore feet. Ben slept the entire ride, I stayed awake buy my sunglasses remained on. It has taken a full week to readjust, to process, to recover from my vacation in the country.

I don’t know if I will be owning a chateau in my life but I look forward to being a guest in one again very soon.

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