wrought-iron gates in front of the château are kept shut. Whoever is driving will hoot and someone, probably Madame Marius the gardener’s wife, hurries from the lodge to open. Ahead is an ornamental avenue of trees planted with geometric spacing between them, and you can glimpse to your left the long low building of Les Pères, so-called presumably because monks or novices were housed here – the two-storey eighteenth-century building has long since been converted into stables. In the park is also the house of Marcel Vernois and his wife Renée, he the bailiff of the estate with its farm and its forests, she the housekeeper, and both of them jolly gnomes of unstoppable energy. Like a French infantryman in the First War, Marcel wears breeches and leather gaiters. We’d walk up partridges or in the evening have a shot at the wild duck on the furthest lake. At the right season he’s after eels or crayfish, and fills buckets with white-shelled snails, a feast for everyone from the château and the farm that Renée serves at a trestle table set up in the open. He taught me how to drive. In the middle of the level crossing at Beaumont-sur-Oise, I was at the wheel when the bell began to warn that a train was about to arrive. As the barrier was coming down, I stalled and panicked. Marcel pushed me out of the seat and drove off the rails just in time.
You go from the château through a wire gate, always unlocked, past the column bases that are all that remains of the abbey church, and so to the Laiterie. This is Max’s dower house. The entrance is glassed in, and in the middle is a rectangular basin with running water. Max has placed a ceramic eel in it, and small children invariably think it is alive. The Laiterie gives on to the wide cobbled farmyard. You need strength to open and close the huge wooden gate in the high enclosing wall at the far end. The immense storage barn is centuries old. Hens scratch about under fruit trees. Marcel puts on a uniform to take honey from the beehives, and he is also responsible for distilling the cassis served every day after meals. Janine lives in a corner house, she’s Polish, a housemaid, and so gentle that she becomes almost invisible.
In front of the château is an expanse of sandy gravel that Albert has the job of raking every morning. A huge man wearing a peaked cap for extra authority, he seems to be keeping an eye out for all comings and goings. The flight of steps up the terrace to the front door has columns framing the entrance and statues set into the wall. Sometimes I still dream of the test I used to impose on myself as a boy, to jump off those steps each time higher, to land sideways on to the patch of grass below. I never dared jump down from the balustrade at the very top.
As the front door opens you would at once be aware of scale and proportion and light. If such a thing is possible, here is intimate grandeur. The hall rises high to a barrel ceiling. At its centre stands a table attributed to the eighteenth-century master Thomire, with a pink granite top over gilded bronze resting on winged sphinxes. Furniture like that conveys a lot of information about the owners and their freedom to indulge their taste. To the right is the drawing room, imposingly circular, with huge windows and a door out to a side terrace. Here the pillars round the wall are purely decorative. Beyond is the fumoir, the room no longer used just for smoking, but also where we would gather informally before or after a meal. To the left is the dining room, a matching circle except that it has ornamental painted panels of flowers and birds. The huge round table seats twenty-four. At the far end of the hall the spiral staircase repeats the motif of a circle. The steps are so shallow that you feel like racing up, past the half-landing with Max’s bedroom and the schoolroom where we had lessons and played with the electrified set of toy Märklin trains belonging to my cousin Philip and which he had laid out in a mock-Swiss landscape.
Max, the second and last Baron Fould-Springer, is nominally the head of the family. Dark on account of its low ceiling, his room halfway up the stairs is an accumulation of family portraits, an Empire bed, cashmere shawls, piles of newspapers and letters, mementos, and a vast collection of his lucky charm, owls of every size in stones, materials, and styles of every sort. He throws nothing away, not even worn envelopes. He is absorbed in the pages of newspapers that print puzzles and spends lots of time writing notes to himself in a pocket-book in a handwriting of tiny hieroglyphics that nobody but him could make sense of. After David Copperfield, he has a long-standing joke with me that he is Murdstone, and he leers, “Boy, I’m going to cane you.”
From the moment he was born in 1906, Jessie took charge of him until she died in 1959. She used to subscribe to the Sunday Express, and would cut out Ripley’s “Believe it or Not,” its regular feature illustrating far-fetched facts, and paste these rectangles like wallpaper in the corridor leading to his bathroom.
Every morning, she ran his bath for him and carried a breakfast tray into his room. He had been sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in the north of France and eventually to Magdalen College, Oxford, remaining uncertain which of these establishments was the most unsatisfactory. He must have been the only undergraduate at Oxford accompanied by his nanny.
Handsome, he had cut quite a dash in the 1930s, entertaining at Royaumont and the host of shooting parties at Kapuvár, an estate inherited in Hungary. His game book records a red-letter day there in August 1935 when he and his guests, the Duc d’Ayen, Comte de Beaumont, Comte de Maillé, Comte de Montsaulnier, Prince Achille Murat, and Jean de Vaugelas, shot an astonishing 6,009 partridges. Once past middle age the thin off-colour face, and especially the questioning look in his eyes, conveyed that he no longer found life easy. His usual comment to the news on television was “On n’a encore rien vu,” we haven’t seen anything yet.
His father’s son, he wore a small Star of David on a gold chain around his neck. Also like Eugène, he had a repertoire of stories and jokes, some of them Jewish. Mocking his education, he’d stress the wrong syllables in names such as Aristophanes and Euripides. One of his favourite quotations was “Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi” (What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to the ox), and another, uttered in a stagey falsetto, was: “Ach aber ach, das Mädchen kam, und nicht in Acht das Veilchen nahm” (Oh dear, the maiden came and paid no attention to the violet). Yet another derived from an elderly aunt who had tried to attract rabbits in the park in Vienna by holding out her hand as though offering food and saying, “Komm, Kaninchen, komm” (Come here, little rabbit, come here).
Playing the invalid, he chewed every mouthful of his food twenty or thirty times, finishing the meal long after everyone else. Liliane quipped, “Il a une très mauvaise santé defer,” (He has really good ill health.) Actually he was athletic, diving off the high cliffs at Eden Roc in the south of France, flying gliders, riding his horse and most remarkably crossing the ornamental canal in front of the château forwards and backwards on a tightrope. His interests were architecture and art, about which he wrote occasional pieces for the magazine Paris Match under the pseudonym Max Viar, short for Viarmes. When the car fetched him for a day of office routine as chairman of Maisons-Alfort, the family-owned factory that carried us all, he looked resigned to the boredom of it. One woman in his life was Paulette Helleu, daughter of the artist, and another was Cécile de Rothschild, Elie’s sister. Asked what sort of a lover Max had been, she replied, “pas plus mal qu’un autre” (no worse than anyone else). Solitary after his nanny’s death, he married Georgette Aftalion. Already middle-aged, she passed the time of day in an armchair, her bony face and staring eyes evidence of psychic disturbances too deep to fathom. To Mitzi, Max was “my adored Sonny,” yet on page after page in her diaries she pulls him to pieces with no apparent understanding that her domination and his dependency might explain the beaten-dog look in his eyes. His homosexual adventures in Paris were an open secret. In his Paris house in the rue Saint-Didier, he holed himself up in the care of Louise Chavanel, more like another elderly nanny than a housekeeper. Every morning there, Dr Vacher, a well-known psychotherapist, came to take breakfast and give professional advice.
White-haired and imperturbable, Jessie and Marion Stainer, the other nanny, were referred to as the duchesses. Throwbacks to the England of Queen Victoria, they were never in a hurry and rarely raised their voices. An unspoken agreement divided responsibility for the children: Max and Poppy (and so ultimately me) going to Jessie, Bubbles and Lily to Nanny Stainer. Rivals as much as colleagues, these two tended to oppose one another,
