Castle in the sky

Just why did a pair of ambitious brothers build a bizarre homage to Versailles out in the wilds of the French countryside? Heidi Fuller-love went there to find out

When I bumped into an old guy with big, red ears propping up a soup-plate-sized beret in a boulangerie on a recent trip to France and he told me about The Draughty Castle, I thought he was referring to some bean-eating local châtelaine with a bad case of wind. Mais non! My baguette-toting interlocutor was talking about Le Château de la Mercerie, a bizarre folly situated an hour’s drive from Limoges and several light years away from what most of us choose to call sanity.

The first glimpse of this castle high on a hill – looking out over forests, rolling pastures, and a handful of cinnamon-tiled roofs that make up the hamlet of Magnac Lavalette – is quite stunning. Like something the Sun King dreamt up in a bucolic fit of folie de grandeur, the 2,200m-long façade – jam-packed with neoclassical arches and Doric columns tacked onto a 19th-century manor house signed “Viollet-le-Duc” – is pure Versailles pastiche.

Staring at it from afar you imagine sumptuous rooms, mahogany floors and frescoed ceilings, so when you get up close you’re even more gobsmacked to discover that this ornate façade is nothing more than a Potemkin village, masking a mess of empty paint pots and rusted bicycles, corrugated iron and tangled weeds.

Who, or what, you wonder, decided to shipwreck this architectural version of the Titanic beneath a sea of vegetation out here in the wilds of a region of southwest France better known for its truffles and foie gras? Martians, you might decide, and take your leave. Press the locals for the tale of Mercerie, however, and you’ll hear something that will make little green men seem positively commonplace.

“Raymond was the leader, Alphonse his younger brother just followed suit,” the beretwearing guy with big ears tells me a few hours later that evening when I corner him in the wood-lined, Pineau-scented snuggery of Magnac’s bar.

Raymond Réthoré was also a bit of a serial liar, it seems, and claimed – according to Beret – that he was the illegitimate offspring of a German princess who’d carry him off to live in her superb schloss when he grew up. “He never could admit that his parents were just pig farmers, just ordinary folk like you and me,” he says, sniffing in disgust.

In 1925, when Raymond was 24, his parents died in a car accident – a pretty wacky (albeit tragic) fact in itself when you consider the scarcity of motor transport at the time – and the Réthoré brothers found themselves at the head of a considerable fortune.

Presumably tired of waiting for his Teutonic mate to turn up and whisk him off to her luxurious abode, Raymond decided it was time to build a palace of his own. We’re going to create our own little Versailles here in the countryside and you’re going to design it, he told Alphonse.

A gaunt, Colonel Pepper look-a-like with a penchant for black fedoras, Raymond’s kid brother obediently abandoned his medical studies and locked himself in the library with a pile of DIY architecture books. Meanwhile, Raymond – who was elected Mayor of Magnac – travelled the world imitating the cultural plundering made fashionable by swashbuckling French statesman André Malraux and picked up a lot of exotic brica- brac to furnish the future château.

Despite the full-time presence of 20 local artisans and a restaurateur imported specially from Italy, progress on the project was incredibly slow. “The problem was that Alphonse was never satisfied with his plans. He drew them up, scored them out, threw them out and started again, and each time the artisans had to change what they’d done. It was a nightmare,” says Dominique Pintaud-salle, another man I meet who wrote a thesis about the wacky pair.

When back from his travels, Raymond held what he called his Sundays in Residence, where he would hear peoples’ problems. One local politician remembers his infallible method of winning popularity. “It was like royalty holding court. Whether it was about a wrangle over a cow, or a bid to buy land, people came from miles around to ask him to intercede in their affairs.”

Réthoré never said no. He would listen solemnly, then produce a sheet of official-looking notepaper with a grand flourish and draw up a letter with great ceremony, always commencing with the same elaborate formula: Dear so and so, I beg of you to have the goodness to consider the request of so and so.

Public popularity bought plenty of votes and in 1958 Raymond attained the pinnacle of his political career when he was elected to the prestigious French National Assembly. La Mercerie, however, was dragging him deeper and deeper into debt.

“There were marble floors, mahogany panelled walls and beautiful azulejos everywhere, and there was even a huge Gallery of Mirrors like in Versailles. But most of he floors were bare concrete and very few of the rooms were wired for electricity,” remembers Bernard Charennac, who was the brothers’ faithful servant for 30 years. “Then, when the money ran out and Raymond told his artisans that he couldn’t pay their wages, they turned up with wheelbarrows and helped themselves to the statues and oil paintings,” he adds.

In 1983, groping his way to the toilet along a passageway that hadn’t been wired with electricity, Alphonse tripped on the missing steps of a half-built staircase, fell headlong into a Greek kouros stood at the bottom and fractured his skull. When he died a few days later, Raymond had his brother’s remains interred in the wall of the castle. A stark marble plaque reads: “Here lies my brother Alphonse.” When Raymond died a few years later his remains were sealed in the pillar opposite.

Luckily, like most tales concerning frogs and princesses, this one does have a somewhat happy ending. In his will Raymond bequeathed Mercerie castle to the state, but the state said no thanks, so Bernard became legatee. He had expected to be saddled with the brothers’ debts, but when the contents of the château were sold at auction he was actually left with a sizeable profit, enabling him to fulfil his own lifelong dream and buy a modern bungalow just outside Magnac Lavalette. Unfortunately, the half-built castle with two bodies sealed in its walls didn’t tempt the buyers much, so La Mercerie was abandoned to a mess of empty paint pots, rusted bicycles and tangled weeds.

Bernard, who receives me for lunch, has kept a few souvenirs of his time with the Réthoré brothers – two sphinxes brought back from the Pyramids stand guard in front of his modern bungalow, a Rodin print gathers dust in the toilet and a huge crystal chandelier dangles from the tongue-and-groove ceiling of his Formica-styled kitchen. Over a meal of his wife’s delicious coq au vin he tells me that times have changed, that the castle no one wanted is being renovated and will soon open as a contemporary art museum.

Comfortably ensconced in the snug of Magnac’s bar later that evening I posit that this splendid local folly, which cost two brothers a small fortune and 40 years of their lives, might finally come into its own. Beret, who doesn’t believe in frogs, princesses or little green men either, just sniffs. “It won’t change the fact that the men who built it were just the sons of a local pig farmer.”

To reach le Château De La Mercerie take the D5 road towards Villebois Lavalette and watch for signposts. For now you can only wander in the vast gardens and admire the facade, but the museum is tipped to open sometime in 2009.

Property ladder
Other architectural aberrations around the Ryanair network
LE PALAIS IDÉAL, GRENOBLE
This wacky stone edifice near Grenoble was erected between1879 and 1912 by Ferdinand “le facteur” Cheval, a postman who picked up every single shell, stick and stone used to build it on his rounds. For more details, visit www.facteurcheval.com

THE CATHEDRAL OF GALLEGO MARTÍNEZ, MADRID
This grandiose cathedral near Madrid was built with recycled materials by an ex-Trappist monk, who had inherited the plot of land from his parents.