A Chateau of One's Own

by Sam Juneau

  ‘That sounds like our house. Very similar. Where was that one?’

  ‘Just an hour west of here with good access to Paris. It’s definitely a possibility.’

  ‘I don’t understand the decoration, though. It seems to me these old French families have no taste. Perhaps it is a matter of money too. That is why they are selling,’ Monique chimed in.

  They had seen three other houses that day. That’s a lot of chateaux, too many cornices and fireplaces and chimneys and parquet floors, an overload of minutiae and myriad details crowding in on their eager, engaged minds.

  ‘Out of curiosity. That first house, the one with the lake, how much was it selling for? More specifically, after seeing all those houses, how much do you think we could get for this one?’

  ‘They were all over a million euros. I would say, easily, you could sell this, even given the work left to do, which is considerable, for 1.1 or 1.2 million euros.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you. How much?’

  ‘Easily over a million.’

  I was speechless. I think I went immediately pale and then bright, glowing red.

  ‘Are you OK, Sam?’ Johan said with a smile.

  ‘I think so. I’m not quite sure. So you’re telling me a house and property of this size, in roughly the same condition, would go for over a million?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  There are those moments in life where revelation and epiphany come together in a union of inspiration and cast everything one holds dear in a new, shocking light. Right there, I formulated a plan in my head as the words of Johan and Monique seemed to bubble up from underwater. This scrap of information gave me a new idea as to how to push forward, take control of our destiny, and relieve some of the constant burden of a relentless financial situation. Most importantly, this offhand observation gave me what a long, knotty three years had so deprived me of: in a word… hope.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Pound of Flesh

  Thrown headfirst into a land of need and necessity, urged on by my fortuitous meeting with the exquisite couple from Antwerp, I set about a scheme to extract us from the deep, dark money pit we had so blithely embraced. I would try the banks, armed with my newly discovered equity and, failing that, would consider more drastic measures.

  Over the next month, I came up with a seven-year business plan, backdating to 2002. The numbers ran something like this: 2002, income 8,000 euros; 2003, income 16,000 euros; 2004, income (still projected) 57,000 euros; and so on and so on. Given this annual growth, the addition of more weddings, and possibly a freshly renovated additional gîte, in two years, I figured we could bring in over 100,000 euros (£69,000), possibly more if my conservative estimates were low.

  Bud and I spoke energetically of the need to begin work on the second floor, renovate one of our large, dormant outbuildings for our personal use and turn the entire chateau over to guests and weddings (at a much higher rate – fewer, more expensive weddings meant more income and less work). We called in our old team of artisans and quickly obtained estimates. A bit wishful, we set the target for all of these projects at 60,000 euros (£41,000). I say ‘wishful’ because anyone who has ever undertaken renovations knows the double-double rule: determine your costs and the time it will take and double each.

  I set up a meeting with our local bank manager and his number two. I prepared our private salon with a roaring fire, made coffee and put out small, refined pastries for their enjoyment. I was filled with doubt as I recalled the comte’s insistence that home equity loans were nonexistent in France. I brushed this aside by convincing myself that I wasn’t looking for a home equity loan but a business loan based on equity. I had to tell myself something.

  They arrived in a white late-model Renault Clio, standard issue vehicle for every living, working human in France. The manager walked cautiously to the front door in tight-fitting trousers, a short-sleeved white shirt and a 1980s paisley tie. His minion followed quickly behind, almost stepping on his heels.

  I showed them in and led them to the salon. They gazed slowly around, apparently sizing up the place. They seemed impressed.

  ‘Thank you for coming today. I believe you’ve received my business plan. I want to talk to you about the possibility of taking a loan, an additional loan, based on the true value of the property. As you know, I already owe 380,000 euros and I’m looking for 60 more based on the worksheets I sent you.’

  ‘Alors, we are very interested in your proposition,’ the manager began. ‘We have looked at it and find it interesting. But you must understand it is a big risk for us. Do you have a job?’

  The entire basis of my project was the fact that I was a small business owner, a serious hotelier with a plan. Perhaps I hadn’t been clear.

  ‘I work here and I’m growing this business, as you can see from our past years’ numbers and the projections.’ I tried not to be impatient. I knew it would be a hard sell.

  ‘This income is not sufficient. It is better if you have a job with a salary.’

  ‘I do have a job – running and owning this business.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but we like for people to have a salary.’

  ‘I hope you will agree there is absolutely no risk for you. If you give me the money, I will be able to make more money and pay you back.’

  I actually had trouble believing I was having this conversation. In any other Western industrial civilised nation, if I entered a bank with eight hundred to a million dollars’ worth of equity in my home, they would wine and dine me, grovel and compete like hungry jackals for the opportunity to lend me money.

  ‘You see, you do not have a salary. And that is a problem. You need to make more money before we can give you more money.’

  ‘This has absolutely nothing to do with salaries. My chateau is a guarantee; en anglais, ‘collateral’. I offer something to you of value, this chateau, and you give me money. Did you see the estimate I sent you? The expert immobilier, surveyor, put the price – conservatively – at 1.1 million euros.’

  ‘We are very uncomfortable with this arrangement. It is very hard to retrieve a house by default in France.’

  ‘It’s actually not. It takes about a year and a half, just like any other country, with some fees. But the value is so great, this is nothing for you.’

  ‘It is just that, it is better if you have a job.’

  I thought my head would explode. My cleanly laid plans being shot down by their failure to see the nub of the issue. Or so I thought. Literally and figuratively, we were speaking different languages and our mindsets were universes apart.

  ‘OK, let me make this simple for you,’ I said, slowly and deliberately, like a teacher speaking to five-year-olds. ‘I have something of value – a chateau, which you see here.’ I pointed to all the things around us and out the window. ‘I owe you 380,000 euros which I have diligently been paying back for two full years now. The value of this chateau, on the low end, is 1.2 million euros. That’s a lot of money.’

  I stood now.

  ‘You lend me money based on the value of the house. I do renovations, increase my advertising, increase my income in line with what we have been doing the past two years, and I pay you back. You lend me more money to do this and you make even more interest and money than you are currently making. I’m sure it is the largest private loan you have at your bank. Isn’t that true?’ He nodded. ‘That’s how loans work.’ I wasn’t sure if my slightly too condescending tone was doing the trick. They sat with blank looks on their faces.

  ‘And even better,’ I was agitated now, ‘if I do not or cannot pay you, you take the house.’ I waved my hands like a madman, grabbing big bundles of air and pushing it towards them. ‘You take the house and sell it and make one million euros – not one hundred, not one thousand, but one million euros. Then you, monsieur, will be the best and most famous bank manager in France. There is no risk. The truth of my proposition is as clear as the sun shining today in the sky.’

&nbs
p; I sat down. Stunned silence.

  ‘Yes, yes, we understand,’ he stammered. ‘But this is not the way we do things in France. It would be better if you had a job.’ And that was that. Our plan, as we had discussed it late into the evenings many times, seemed so simple to me and Bud. In fact, I can almost believe that in America or the UK, by law, I would be forced to take an equity loan. It might be a crime, punishable by fines and prison, if I did not seek and take a loan on the greater value of my home.

  My pulse was racing. I had exercised myself to the extent that if we continued, I might resort to physical violence.

  ‘I think we are finished. Have a nice day, gentlemen. I’m sure you can find your way out.’

  I darted into the kitchen and explained everything to Bud, complete with hand gestures and wild facial expressions.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Sam. It seemed so clear, so simple. What are we going to do?’

  ‘In the short run, I will have to go back to New York. We are on the verge of running low again, the property tax is nearing and you know how costly the winters are.’

  ‘I can’t believe you have to leave again. We can’t keep doing this. Plus I’m five months pregnant and getting bigger. I won’t be able to move very easily as things progress and I have to take care of the kids at the same time.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m so sorry. But it will be shorter this time because we made a bit of money this summer. I will aim to go for just a month or month and a half. Does that work?’

  Bud began to well up and I couldn’t bear to look at her like this. We were depleted. Our morale was shot, we were physically, and partly spiritually, defeated. Quite frankly, there are many things in life worse than failing to achieve one’s dream. The sickness or loss of a loved one, homelessness, civil war, lack of good drinking water. Of course, we realised this. In the end, we still had a beautiful house worth quite a bit. But dreams and their deaths do trigger the feeling of little deaths in us. It is not the worst thing in the world, but it’s deeply disappointing nevertheless. In the end, though, it was clear: ‘life has many worthwhile aspects’, as my essayist friend was once reminded.

  In late October, just weeks after my deeply frustrating meeting with the moneylenders, I made my way back to New York. Again, no job and no place to live. It felt like Groundhog Day, different day, different year, same story.

  I ended up working for ABC News and A&E Network, making a one-hour documentary on the founder of Taco Bell, Glen Bell. It was part of A&E’s week of Super Size Me documentaries on pop culture icons who changed the way we live today. It was good work and I ended up in California at the beach again while Bud remained in our vast, cold chateau, heavily pregnant with two busy and demanding children. It was over this time that Bud made friends with a lovely, generous couple from England, Tom and Hannah, who lived on a 20-acre farm just north of the chateau. Tom was an ex-special ops man. His missions and experiences were so top secret, we never came to know exactly what it was he had done in his former life before coming to France. Hannah had been a firefighter in England and had the dubious honour of being the only woman in Europe who had more animals than Bud. Animals she too had rescued. They had transported 57 various creatures from England and the number grew every day. Their presence in Bud’s life was a blessing.

  Through a friend of a friend, they had heard we needed some trees cut and removed, and they came diligently and regularly to stock up for the winter. During their visits, they would call in on Bud and bring her jams, relishes and vegetables, fix things and generally serve the neighbourly role of keeping Bud from going insane.

  Every night, Bud and I spoke on the phone. She shared her day with me, the comings and goings of Tom and Hannah and the antics of our busy, sauvage children.

  We had not yet articulated a way out of our money matters. One night, I began.

  ‘Bud, maybe we should think about selling the house.’

  ‘What are we going to do instead? We have a business here, we’ve started something. We can’t just leave. I’m getting ready to have the baby and I’m organising everything for the birth. I can’t believe you’re saying this.’ She was tearful.

  ‘It’s just something to think about. We could make a good bit of money and start something else, something that gives us more pleasure. Something easier. There has to be an easier way to make a living and live a life.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more about this now. Let’s have the baby and see what happens.’

  ‘OK. I won’t mention it again.’

  I had forgotten. Bud was deep into her period of nesting instinct, something she – and I think most women – embrace as the body’s rumblings let a mother know something big is about to happen. So I dropped the subject.

  I spent three months in the States, working and crashing on sofas and flying around until late January. I finished my final edit on a Friday and took the next flight out. I had missed my family terribly. I found it hard to accept that I was forced, by our own decisions and dreams, to uproot at least once a year and leave the nest for the never-ending demands of money.

  Two weeks after I landed back in France, our third baby was born, Oak. This time we opted for the public health system. Here, we had discovered, only midwives delivered babies. The doctor would only be called in an emergency. After our last experience, we were finished with doctors. The birth was a thing of beauty, and quick too. Bud pushed the little fella out at 2 a.m. and later that morning we were back in our house, cosy and safe with our tiny new gift.

  As Bud settled in with Oak, I took to roaming the grounds trying to summon up admiration and joy for this splendid property, but all I conjured was resentment and distrust. With the exception of my family, I couldn’t wring an ounce of pleasure out of the place. All the plans, our grand ideals and romantic visions of living like lords in the French countryside, melted away into one monumental case of indigestion.

  Something inside of me didn’t want to give up quite that easily. We had bought the house four years earlier. We had only moved to France permanently a year after that and we had wrangled our way through only two full summers of running a chambre d’hôtes. I wasn’t normally a quitter. But the more I thought, the clearer it became that it was ridiculous that we should work so hard, solely for the privilege of living in one small part of a massive house.

  Here I was, holding tenuously onto an idea, an ideal, of life in a chateau as lord of the manor. The reality of our life included constant invasions by strangers in a service industry where everyone came before the server. We were both lords and servants, châtelains et domestiques. We had created this great romance in the realm of our fantasies, where the world of ideas was disconnected from the everyday life we lived. We had erected through sheer will and hoping a stunning edifice, a sublime castle, a profound theory of how the world worked and how we should live. All the while, we chose to live not in the entirety of this chateau, but dwelled, in our everyday life, in a little, cold room in the basement. OK, not really a basement, but in a small part of the chateau, tending to the needs of others so they could live their dream of castle life.

  I had a bad case of existential despair. We had sought to become something that we were never meant to be. We sought not ourselves and our own true bliss, but some starry-eyed vision of utopia rooted in seventeenth-century feudal France.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Forsan et haec olim

  meminisse iuvabit

  The Aeneid, Virgil

  In the first chapter of Virgil’s The Aeneid, the hero and his shipmates are shipwrecked after a wild storm. They have recently been exiled from their beloved Troy. They are hungry, exhausted and drenched. In similar circumstances, another leader – Churchill, let’s say – might have exhorted his charges to great feats of courage and perseverance. Aeneas delivers a cold lump of encouragement by simply offering, ‘Perhaps some day it will be pleasing to remember even these things.’ One day, we’ll look back and laugh at all this.

  I served Bu
d breakfast in bed as the baby cuddled close by every day for a couple of weeks. One morning, I ventured into dangerous territory again.

  ‘Bud, I’ve been thinking. You know how hard it was this winter and last winter and the winter before that? It’s just too much. The bank is stuck in the nineteenth century. We will get nothing from them. This summer looks pretty good but it will be a struggle for a few years to come…’

  ‘Sam, stop.’ I thought she had forgotten her prohibition against talking about our dire financial straits. Evidently not. ‘I know where you’re going and I agree. I’m not entirely sure we should sell but I am open to putting it out there, getting it on the market and seeing what happens. My fear is it’s too much of a white elephant, too massive. There’s still a lot of work to do here, as you well know. The place still, after all our hard work, feels a little cold, austere. There’s the heating system, the old roof, the facade and the cornice around the back. I think it might take a long time to sell, if it ever sells.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re so optimistic. But I’m very happy you’re open to the idea of at least testing the waters.’ I was smiling at this point, delighted Bud was open to my latest scheme. She smiled with only the occasional frown as I continued. ‘I think it’s a great property, despite our intimate awareness of all its faults. But you’re right, similar houses like this have taken eighteen months to two years to sell. Let’s push ahead with the bookings for the summer and see how the chips fall.’

  ‘I feel much more comfortable with the idea now. It has been difficult. There have been good things too. We’ve raised the kids here for the past four years. Grim and Oak were born here. It will be hard if we leave.’

  I was happy, not because Bud saw it all my way, but because we were coming to some sort of meeting of the minds. Like most couples, our marriage wasn’t perfect, but we loved one another and had very similar, almost pitch perfect sensibilities. We had the same threshold for suffering and hardship, the same desire for joy and relaxation, and similar levels of energy. We tended to view our reality and the world around us very nearly the same way. Hugely important when making life’s big decisions. It’s what had landed us here, our vision of our life, and it’s what might just get us out of this mess.