The Poet and The Château

For a time I worked at a 17th century château, built by Mansard on the outskirts of Paris. During my stay there I began to surmise through the building’s iconography that its owner, René de Longueil, had been an alchemist. Illness pulled me away, however, before I could thoroughly enough document my theory for publication. At all events it was an spell-binding place, once called “the most perfect building in France.” Many of us know the story of the Intendant Fouquet thrown into jail at the behest of a jealous Louis XIV after the king had visited the beautiful Vaux-le-Vicomte. His green-eyed Majesty had Vaux in mind when he modeled his Versailles upon it. What is less well-known is that Vaux had its own model and that was the very Château de Maisons at Maisons-Laffitte where I once was employed. One goes to Maisons and as soon as the château comes into view, one is under its spell. Its perfectly harmonious proportions and gorgeous masonry of golden gray ensorcell the visitor. Now on the list of Heritage Sites for France it had not always been so favored and at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries had dangerously deteriorated. It must have been half abandoned for its attics are full of graffiti bearing names with dates from that era

There was at the time a restoration board fighting for the château’s very survival. One among its members was a certain Marie Junia Emilie Eugénie Lecomte who had been born and raised in the town to the town north west of the capital. She is better known for having been the mother of poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, raising him alone in the wake of her husband’s 1898 suicide. Was the child given free reign of the premises? Although he doesn’t seem to have left his name scribbled on any attic wall, there is reason to think the manor left its mark upon him. Look again at the image at the head of this entry and now look upon the Château de Raray, in which the poet found his perfect enchanted château for his mid-1940s film Beauty and the Beast.

This is no less than perfect insofar as it was the author of the fairy tale (if fairy tales might be said to have an author) Charles Perrault, who said of Maisons that it “is of such singular beauty that there is not a curious foreigner who does not go there to see it, as one of the finest things that we have in France”
Open to the public, the château does not boast masses of visitors. A bon entendeur.