In 1886, when one of my friends was staying at Abondant, the hangings were the same which had been there all through the Revolution.  She told me she had never been so miserable as the first time she stayed at the chateau during the lifetime of the late Duchesse de Vallambrosa.  They gave her the Duchesse de Tourzel’s room, thinking it would interest her as a chambre historique.  She was already nervous at sleeping alone on the ground-floor, far from all the other inmates of the chateau.  The room was enormous—­walls nearly five metres high—­the bed looked like an island in the midst of space; there was very little furniture, and the white feathers on the bed-posts nodded and waved in the dim light.  She scarcely closed her eyes, could not reason with herself, and asked the next morning to have something less magnificent and more modern.

In all the bedrooms the dressing-tables were covered with dentelle de Binche[15] of the epoch, and all the mirrors and various little boxes for powder, rouge, patches, and the hundred accessories for a fine lady’s toilette in those days, were in Vernis Martin absolutely intact.  The drawing-rooms still had their old silk hangings—­a white ground covered with wreaths of flowers and birds with wonderful bright plumage—­hand-painted—­framed in wood of two shades of light green.

  [15] Binche, name of a village in Belgium where the lace is made.

The big drawing-room was entirely panelled in wood of the same light green, most beautifully and delicately carved.  These old boiseries were all removed when the chateau was sold.  After the death of the Duchesse de Tourzel the chateau went to her niece, the Duchesse des Cars—­who left it to her niece, the Duchesse de Vallambrosa, a very rare instance, in France, of a property descending directly through several generations in the female line.

It was sold by the Vallambrosas.  The old wood panels are in the Paris house of a member of that family.  The park was very large and beautifully laid out, with the fine trees one sees all over Normandy.

Twenty years ago a salle de spectacle “en verdure” still existed in the park—­the seats were all in grass; the coulisses (side scenes) made in the trees of the park—­their boughs cut and trained into shape, to represent green walls, a marble group of allegorical figures at the back.  It was most carefully preserved—­the seats of the amphitheatre looked like green velvet and the trees were always cut in the same curious shapes.  It seemed quite a fitting part of the fine old place, with its memories of past fetes and splendours, before the whirlwind of liberty and equality swept over the country.

Many of the chateaux are changing hands.  The majorat (entail) doesn’t exist in France, and as the fortunes must always be divided among the children, it becomes more and more difficult to keep up the large places.  Life gets dearer every day—­fortunes don’t increase—­very few young Frenchmen of the upper classes do anything.  The only way of keeping up the big places is by making a rich marriage—­the daughter of a rich banker or industrial, or an American.