My Home & Some Castles: Life in a country with 45,000 big houses

For a lot of women around the world, it’s a castle that needs to be cleaned, fixed up, and made welcoming for family and friends. It’s a job.

I retired from a full-time career almost a decade ago which meant I never have to go to the office, get on a plane or spend the night in a hotel room again. But, my side gig, being a wife, mother, and house manager, continued.

About eight years ago, I took a break from castle management as well and moved into a 95-square-meter Paris apartment, hired a kind and lively Filipino gentleman named Randy to clean it, and started paying money to a charming Parisian man who is my landlord and the savior who fixes anything that breaks (very little does, but when it does, Bernie rushes over to mend it.)

My apartment is half of the second (American third) floor of a 19th-century Haussman building in the Paris Marais. It’s technically in the third arrondissement and Arts & Metiers quartier of the Ile de France, which is bisected by a slowly meandering river that connects the two sides of the city with 34 eclectic bridges that lots of hyperactive folks try walking it all in a day or two.

Right now, all but two of the bridges are barricaded in anticipation of the opening of the Paris Olympics scheduled for July 26, 2024.

These Olympics have driven me out of town for the duration, along with many of my expat and native Parisian friends.

For me, the Breton region of France has been my traditional summer vacation spot for nearly 20 years and I’m back here this summer, but in a house that’s new to me and my family. It’s the home of my Breton friend Christophe’s late mother, a charming stone Breton-style house that sits on the banks of the much-ballyhooed Golfe of Morbihan, a natural harbour on the coast of the department of Morbihan in southern Brittany. (To make it even better, my industrious daughter who’s a fantastic cook is here with me for the month with her two boys and they’re giving Randy a run for his money.)

The gulf, its English name, the Morbihan, comes from the Breton ‘Ar Mor Bihan‘ which means ‘the little sea’ (in the closely related Welsh dialect y môr bychan). The Atlantic Ocean is outside the spit of land that encircles the gulf, (Ar Mor Bras in Breton). I’ve heard there are as many islands in the Gulf as there are days of the year. There aren’t. The gulf has about 40 islands, depending on the tides. Many islands are private property, except the largest two, Île au Moins and Île d’Arz.

What the gulf has more of than days of the year is sailboats. This is the place where great sailors come to train for racing and pleasure. You’ve never seen so many sails as there are fluttering here on a breezy day. Every other year there is a grand regatta of great sailing vessels that attracts thousands of participants.

45,000 French castles

The region also has its share of the 45,000 French castles that dot this exquisite country’s 36,000 communities. Rhuys Peninsula, the spit of land that forms the gulf borders the Atlantic Ocean on its southern coast and boasts an extraordinary range of megalithic monuments. The passage of Gavrinis, on a small island in the Gulf, is one of the most important prehistoric sites in Europe. Some of its ruins date to at least 3300 BC — 200 years older than England‘s Stonehenge.

The remaining stones ‘round these parts (points for Monty Python fans who caught that reference) were used for big, very, very big houses most of us call castles or chateaux.

My longtime friend and current summer landlords, Christophe, and his charming, bright-eyed sister Marie Odile (Marie O for short) have close connections to some of these big piles that have belonged to their noble French family for 17 generations.

When I first met Christophe, through other French friends, over a decade ago, he offered me a visit to his family’s “beach house” on the golfe. That being said, I’m accustomed to the McMansions of the Delaware shore, Long Island Sound, and New England’s Maine coast.

Those cottages are shacks compared to those Christophe and Marie O share with their cousins and where Christophe spent summers growing up with his grandparents.

The Chateau Truscat has been in their family, the Franchevilles, since the 16th century when their ancestor made his fortune farming salt in the marshes (the marais) of their property outside Sarzeau.

(Olivier Chenelle an artisanal salt farmer of the 21st century has been producing salt from the Trusccat marshes thanks to Christophe and Marie O’s generosity, for years now. I’ve bought and shared his salt varieties. Tragically, his farms were destroyed, along with many of the specimens of collected tree varieties in the Truscat park land, last fall in the violent storms that swept through the region. You can support Olivier’s efforts to restore the salt farm marshes and his salt here.) Here’s a photo of Olivier working the now-destroyed salt beds.

Marie O graciously invited us to Truscat for a visit last weekend and we toted a nice bottle of champagne for apéro time as the sun dipped slowly toward the western horizon making the gulf’s waters shimmer in the twilight. Sipping glasses of Veuve Cliquot and drinking in the view have been a much-anticipated treat during my visits here as long as I’ve known Christophe. But this week may have been the most beautiful sojourn of the past decade.

We also toured the chateau’s interior and it was exciting to see the family’s painstaking restoration of the small stone chapel that sits next to the chateau on the property. The cousins of the family gathered to help paint the chapel’s perfect little interior dome in deep gulf blue with tiny gold stars. We examined the centuries-old artifacts of the chapel and all of us tried to solve the mystery of the board-shielded hole in the 18-inch stone walls that was obviously used as a pass through of some sort.

The former residence of the Dukes of Brittany, stands on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in the Sarzeau commune, in the center of a once a vast wooded area. Built about 800 years ago, at the end of the Middle Ages, it’s also on the Rhuys peninsula, towering over the salt marshes and meadows clustered around it and leading to our favorite local beaches on the Atlantic Ocean.

(See the picture above. Yes, this is exactly what I see from my beach chair.)

Sitting on a beach in the shadow of a massive ancient castle is an experience not to be missed.

When I first inspected the chateau almost 20 years ago it was a rotting pile of peninsula rubble with virtually no roof and crumbling walls and floors. More recently, it’s undergone a big facelift that included not just a roof and good floors, but an elevator, lots of high-tech audiovisual equipment, and careful restoration of tile floors that used to be part of the chateau’s adjacent chapel.

We didn’t get an apéro at Suscino when we visited this week. The private foundation that restored the chateau charges an entry fee and sells plenty of Suscino “merch” on-site in their boutiques.

This 13th-century hunting lodge has more history than I’ll bother you with, but its past is a walk through French time. Archeologists are currently excavating large areas of the interior courtyard and the surrounding moat so there will soon be more tales of its life on the ocean.

Meanwhile, back in Paris, my sports-writer friends are checking up on my quiet, empty apartment that my guy Randy is making sure will be my French castle when I return after the sporting festivities. Parisian friends who opted to stay put for the chaos report it is even crazier than I imagined it would be.

I’m sticking to my Morbihan “castle” as long as Christophe and Marie O will have me.