Life in the French Country House

A Social And Political History

A perceptive and witty account of the French upper classes at home, showing how their way of life and its setting evolved through the centuries, inextricably linked together, to create a society admired and emulated throughout Europe.

This book is concerned not just with the variety, wealth and beauty of the chateaux themselves, but with how they reflected in their interior decoration and organisation the manners and mores of their occupants - how the different rooms were lived in, how the French lifestyle changed over the decades, and how the design and decoration of the buildings developed to accommodate it.

All of this is gleaned from vivid, often first-person accounts, from letters and journals, the records of foreign visitors, inventories and books of etiquette that take us into the very buildings themselves and give us an intimate sense of what it meant to inhabit one.