THE ACHE OF exile has animated many great works of art. Pablo Neruda published “Canto General,” his lacerating book of poems about living underground, in the wake of his 1948 expulsion from the Chilean Senate; Oscar Wilde produced the crystalline prose of “De Profundis” while banished to England’s Reading Gaol prison for sodomy. Being forced to flee from Germany to Paris to New York as the Nazis rose to power was the catalyst for the painter George Grosz’s 1944 masterpiece, “Cain, or Hitler in Hell.”
Houses, too, can embody the pain — and potential rebirth — that can follow the displacement of their owners. For Nicolas Guedroitz, the current chatelain of the 16th-century Château Montalembert, situated on more than 500 acres in Maîche, a hard-to-reach commune near the French border with Switzerland, exile has proved a source of beauty and, paradoxically, constancy. Loss and longing — and the drive to recapture the past and keep it safe forever — have shaped the 22,000-square-foot house, which is clad in blue-gray local stone with traditional wooden volets painted pure white.
First, there was the experience of an early heir to the house, Baron Alexandre-Nicolas-Joseph Guyot de Maîche, a nobleman in King Louis XVI’s court. The baron, who had moved from Château Montalembert to the Palace of Versailles, 275 miles away, in the 1770s, was promoted to marquis but was cast out several years later after a minor slight, having made a snide comment about the notoriously extravagant regent’s spending. Chastened but unbowed, Guyot de Maîche and his wife, Louise Marie Catherine Genevieve de La Touche, returned to the obscure confines of his ancestral estate, sculpting it to mirror the life that had been denied them. A landscape designer created a 12-acre formal garden inspired by the famed palace’s grand disciplined parterres with topiary hedges and, throughout the interiors, the marquis installed the intricate parquet floors with interlaced squares that Louis XIV had made fashionable — the effect would come to be known as parquet de Versailles. The couple commissioned countless flourishes favored by the Bourbons, including ornately carved overhangs above the many seating and sleeping alcoves. “If it hadn’t been for the king sending them away, the interiors would be very different,” says Guedroitz, 59, as he sits on an 18th-century armchair in the Petit Salon, his feet clad in slippers so as not to scratch the parquet, light pouring through the tall windows. It may have been less of a Rococo folly, but perhaps not as exceptionally considered or well built.
Guedroitz’s maternal grandfather, the Belgian diplomat Comte Guillaume de Hemricourt de Grünne, whose family was bequeathed the house by the marquis in the late 18th century, inherited it in 1923 and, soon after, added a Versailles-inspired pool and fountain of Pierre de France sandstone tiles. But it is under Guedroitz, who took over the chateau in 2008 from an aunt, that the house has reached its aesthetic apotheosis. To the layers of French tradition — the restrained early Baroque style, the florid ornamentation of the 18th century and the revivalist fervor embodied by his grandfather — he has added his father’s story of exile from half a world away.
GUEDROITZ’S FATHER, OF Lithuanian origin, was of royal Russian stock. His father, Prince Nicolas Vladimirovich Guedroitz, was a member of the White Army, an anti-Bolshevik movement, which meant he would experience exile on an epic level, driven out of Russia and into Serbia in 1920, a couple of years after the czar, whose name he shared, was executed with his family in a cellar following the Russian Revolution. The prince died from war wounds soon after the birth of Guedroitz’s father, Alexis, who went on to become a professor of Russian literature and an interpreter. For Guedroitz, who was raised in Brussels, such history became destiny: After years spent working in the prints department at Sotheby’s in London, he opened an antiques gallery on Pimlico Road specializing in Russian furniture — polished mahogany pieces, ornately inlaid with brass motifs; among his prominent regular customers was the American architect Peter Marino.
By 2005, with mid-20th-century design ascendant and the market for European antique furniture moribund, Guedroitz had downsized the gallery and turned his attention to the chateau. His instinct was to marry the two periods that had shaped the house’s legacy: the pre-revolutionary years in both France and Russia, well over 100 years apart. While he and his wife, Solina, 54, and their three children, now grown, were then spending most of their time in a Victorian townhouse in London, they passed their summers at Château Montalembert, just as he had growing up. As a boy, he had followed his grandfather around the property as the comte inspected the grounds and consulted with his foresters as to how many trees to cut that season. While listening to Beethoven’s 1798 Piano Sonata No. 7 in D Major, he studied his grandfather’s gilt-edged histories of the French Revolution. “Some people want to go to Disney World,” he says, “but I longed every summer to return here.”
NOW UPDATED WITH new plumbing, double-glazed windows and a black tile roof that glints in the late spring sunlight, the estate is arrayed with furnishings that might have had a place in either czarist dachas or a pre-Napoleonic past. Up a set of curved Renaissance-era stone stairs off the entrance hall is the Grand Salon, ballroom-size and adorned with vividly colored scenes depicting panoramic views of Switzerland and Rome. Produced by the French company Zuber, the oldest surviving wallpaper manufacturer in the world, they were installed by the marquis at some point between 1818 and 1830. In the middle of the room are a pair of Louis XVI bergères upholstered in lemon yellow silk; Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle sat in them in November 1944 when the chateau was at the front lines of the war; they were invited by the French military officer Jean de Lattre de Tassigny to strategize the liberation of Alsace from the Germans.
Downstairs, a former bed chamber is now referred to as the Russian Room. A bed remains, draped in blue moiré silk and tucked into a white-painted Baroque alcove lined with fading floral wallpaper from the 18th century, but the room is largely a showcase for Guedroitz’s most prized Russian antiques (though the massive mahogany secretaire full of hidden drawers, built by a protégé of Catherine the Great’s favorite cabinetmaker and referred to by Guedroitz as the Elephant, is too big to fit). There are Empire-era chairs with bronze-mounted starburst designs on intricately carved backs, and an 18th-century writing desk near a tall window, swagged in white silk, which looks out onto the formal garden.
A pair of glass-front armoires, custom-fashioned in London in mahogany and brass to resemble ones Guedroitz glimpsed in a Russian palace, face each other from either side of the room. Within them stand dozens of toy soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars. As a child of 7 or 8, he hand-painted the models and, when his son, now in his 20s, was the same age, Guedroitz instructed the boy on the intricate technique; one day a grandchild might be taught the same. That the figurines are from a period outside of Louis-era France or czarist Russia does not bother him. After all, Napoleon himself knew a thing or two about exile.
Production: Christopher Garis. Photo assistant: Théophile Mottelet
