Arrival at the Domaine de la Tour is a surprise and enchantment almost worthy of le Grand Meaulnes*… It sits on the edge of a forest, somewhere north the town of Falaise in Normandy, in the (very grand) out-buildings of a handsome 18th Century château. The drive brings you beneath an alley of huge trees. Suddenly the château leaps out at you, telescoped along its own, more formal drive, only to vanish again 30 metres later.
… and amid this timeless French elegance there I was, tootling along on my push-bike, looking not unlike a tinker, handlebars swinging with plastic bags (of food, no evening meal was offered the night I stayed). The impression of an itinerant overshadowed, nay belittled, by grandeur was merely heightened by the topiary along the drive up to the chateau.
Undaunted, I carried on, through the car park with its electric charging stations, and rolled up to the entrance to the gîte. Straight into what looked like a cocktail party, full of polka dots and outrageous colour. Was this their standard welcome for a bicycle-borne guest…? Or had I, like Meaulnes himself, stumbled into another world… Rolled unwittingly into a different dimension? One of impossibility and romance?
It turned out they were the members of a contemporary dance group who use the gîte’s meeting space for practice; and as they were departing they were sharing a drink with the owner of the Domaine, Mark.
Once they had dispersed, Mark walked me through into the courtyard, surrounded on three sides by two and three storey former barns and stables, now restored, and a (rather elegant) farmer’s dwelling. (The fourth has a hedge separating off the chateau itself.) If these are out-buildings, they are extremely grand – all walls of creamy limestone (from Caen, nearby) with large arched doorways downstairs and decorative dormers in the steeply pitched tiled roofs. Inside the roofs, huge original beams stand in a complex network of wood still supporting the roofs.
The Domaine, which is carefully cloistered away from the chateau, is an informal and family-run B&B with thirteen rooms across a couple of ‘gîtes’ (self-catering apartments with more than one bedroom), in the grand farmer’s house, and a handful of chambres d’hôtes - bedrooms with a shared sitting area - in the main building. I stayed in one of these, set under the huge roof of the barn. As usual I spent a while showering and recovering after quite a long day in the saddle - and the frustrations of punctures… and the heat… – but soon enough I was out into the garden warming up in the last of the evening sun. The lawns, peppered with traditional farm machinery and carriages, give onto fields where horses graze (you can ride them) and beyond that is forest, the ‘King’s Forest’, where of course you can walk or take a picnic.
These were functional buildings, hardly built for light or the view, but they have been well restored. My chambre d’hôte felt a little dark, with a single skylight, but others have large windows and full-height glass doors (the sort that in English we call French windows of course, but in the current circumstances that’s just confusing). And colours are bold and often bright, giving a modern feel, while there is a self-confident nod to the obvious past with its traditional furniture. Generally the Domaine fulfils its brief well of taking a rural setting and turning it into something romantic and contemporary. Breakfast was served, to newspapers and a repressed urgency of the school run (next door in the kitchen, and to my delight as I no more have anything to do with it), in a light, familiar room with traditional decor.
But back to the ambient sense of magic. It’s one of the best aspects of travel, that air of irrational expectation that something amazing might happen just around the corner. OK, I wouldn’t want to fall into a Grand Meaulnes-like saga (the main character really managed to screw himself up, and a few others besides), but to happen on something magical that teeters on another dimension is a fantastic feeling.
I wondered if the porthole to this lost but enchanting world might lie in the handful of modern if slightly baroque oil paintings depicting famous figures from the history of the region. These included Mme de Séran, a former owner of the chateau, and Mathilda of Flanders, who became Queen of England when she married William the Conqueror, also pictured, if rather unsympathetically, and who was born in the castle at Falaise, of course, just three miles away.
Or perhaps it would happen if I got lost in the wood? But there I would be far more likely to uncover the gîte’s other main story: that of the World War II. The chateau was occupied by the German Army, and they built an ammunition depot in the Forest (there are still traces of this). Many of the visitors to the gîte have an interest in the Normandy Landings, which took place on beaches just 30 miles to the north and of course the Battle for Normandy, which culminated around here. The Battle of Falaise Gap, in which the German Army Group B was surrounded and eventually destroyed, laying open the approaches to Paris, took place all around here.
But there is certainly romance in the chateau too. Although separate (the Domaine’s buildings were hived off from the chateau about 50 years ago), the chateau still gives it a sense of majesty – it has a lovely neo-classical design with a small amount of decorative stonework (staircase, balcony, pediment and dormers) at its centre flanked by two storeys of tall windows and a grey tile roof. And it looks superb poking from among its trees and above its green gumdrop topiary.
It was built in 1769 for Count Louis-François-Anne de Séran, towards the end of the reign of Louis XV. Madame de Séran was noted as the most beautiful woman around the Falaise area and apparently became a mistress of Louis XV (one of rather a lot of mistresses, history tells us). But she was more than the area’s most beautiful woman: she had an interest in literature and turned the chateau into a sort of salon, a meeting place for the literary luminaries of the age – including poet and novelist Jean-Francois Marmontel and the mathematician, Enlightenment thinker and leading ‘encyclopédiste’ Jean d’Alambert. Far from the romanticism of Alain Fournier, but deeply literary all the same…
* Not many people nowadays have heard of Le Grand Meaulnes, a romantic epic written by (Henri Alban) Alain Fournier in 1913. It tells of a charismatic young schoolboy who gets lost one night in a horse and cart and happens on a magical, near-mystical celebration in a chateau, or domaine. And of course a girl with whom he falls in love. The rest of the book is spent with his attempts to find the domaine and the girl who lived there. It’s exceptionally romantic and a bit unbelievable but engaging nonetheless. Alain Fournier, seen as one of the bright lights of the French literary scene at the start of the Twentieth Century, was killed in the first month of World War I in 1914.