Sometimes the promises may be a little hollow and the veneer on the reproduction furniture a touch too thin, the pillows a bit hard and the sauces reduced just too far, but other times it is all run as if Madame La Duchesse had just left for a quick flurry to Versailles to teeter amongst the courtesans.
It is almost as if there was some divine Francophile plan that caused the châteaux builders to cast their eyes across the land and visualise the roaring paths of the péages. How neat that you just take a turn, a couple more, and then there is the sign ‘Château Plein de Charm à not very many hundred metres’, the words prettily illuminated with bunches of grapes, promises of agréable, bon confort or even confort raffiné. Sometimes the promises may be a little hollow and the veneer on the reproduction furniture a touch too thin, the pillows a bit hard and the sauces reduced just too far, but other times it is all run as if Madame La Duchesse had just left for a quick flurry to Versailles to teeter amongst the courtesans.

How the Englishman sighs when he finds bon confort just five minutes from his wrestling match with the supersonic speeds and machismo flexing of the fast lane. You just do not really find quite the same thing nestling off junction 6 of the M4 out of London or indeed cupped in a curve off the ausfahrt on the A3 headed for Dusseldorf. These little châteaux, manoirs and relais sit at the end of drives – some set in park land, others seeming to sit in the middle of fields, some with fat-bellied turrets, others with perfect 18th century symmetry; or perhaps just a grand farmhouse with the chickens still on the loose, or gilded and garlanded like an opera set. When I have picked right, Madame has always been much in evidence, being discreet with lovers and attentive to loners, always offering a free hand with pillows and gourmet menu advice.

It is not even as if they are a great trade secret, shared only by the top echelon of travellers with expensive tastes and matching decks of credit cards. These are within the budget of everyone prepared to spend moderately on good living, and respite from the rush and the hurry. They appear to prickle across the French countryside, dotting the road maps with promises of elegant furniture carefully placed around huge, sparse rooms, deft service during long dinners with great deference shown to both the palate and the digestion; for it is always the foie and the national terror of maladie de foie that seem to govern the menu planning.

They have been pushed to the limit. There was a Christmas morning that had been spent in moody progress through unfestive gloom and fog on the N6. There had been an escape from a former residence of Cistercian monks, near Nuits-St-George, where Madame had a penchant for sticking to monastic strictures to an almost perverse extent. We had been barracked into our rooms on Christmas morning until released for a stale breakfast amongst sad-eyed fellow tourists in the Yuletide vortex. But a bolt up the N6 found redemption at a manor house near Rémy. Madame Sanitas could not have been further from the maniacal Madame of Nuits-St-George. She plumped us up over tea and then sent us off around the little park to recover from road trauma and visions of mad monks. Christmas began with the sheer joy of having not so much as a miniature mince pie in sight, nor the string of elderly relatives with wet lips and sherry breath. Salmon baked in tarragon and cray fish tails with basil in filo pastry do not sit on the stomach in the same way as most festive fare.

Or there was the time when the Périphérique had been beyond endurance and Fontainbleau had offered a cold cheek. So on to Villeneuve La Dondagre to the hostellerie where the rooms were named after rubicund opera characters. After six courses and much fine wine the Spanish girls on the wallpaper in the Carmen bedroom danced like dervishes. This time Madame had created a journey through provençal cuisine, taking in grilled goats cheese and sliced artichokes, rascasse in court bouillon with coriander, tarragon sorbet with marc de Provence, baby rabbit roasted with rosemary in olive tapenade and airy millefeuille with Roquefort. Somehow it was balanced so that it was possible to squeeze in a tiny pot of dark chocolate spiked with orange and lemon zest, a strawberry sorbet and lavender and honey ice cream; all so delicately laid upon the plate as to be no threat to a bulging girth.

There was a tennis court hidden in the old kitchen garden, a swimming pool beside the parterre, a private terrace outside the room of the spinning Carmen for breakfast in the sun. There were only five other guests, so it was possible to swim with the same energy as the bacchanalian dancers on the wall paper in order to start on the next gourmet tour that Madame had lined up. As a mental ‘amuse gueule’ she led us through the herb garden and gave elegant descriptions of just how each variety was used in her kitchen. The only thing that seemed strange on that warm September night was the roaring fire in the hall outside the dining room. Then came the kitchen boy bearing a huge ham. He set it on a spit and spent the following hours dripping a mixture of honey and herbs over it, patiently turning it by hand while the honey blackened and bubbled.

Another potent draw to these places is their breakfasts. We have all become so numbed by the croissant invasion of Europe that our standards seem tricky to reach, and it is rare to find a French breakfast as we feel it should be, according to our bastardized Euro-café examples; often the croissants are jaded and the brioches drier than a mouth of Kleenex. The simple truth is that frou-frou pâtisseries are not really the staple French breakfast at all. When you are presented with a basket of warm bread, home-made preserves and bowls of thick coffee it seems not to matter at all. Quite a few of them do their own baking, and if they do make croissants they crumble for the expectant audience and the brioche puff and pout as they should.

But it is not just the kitchens that make these places the havens that we so long to find. It is a formula made up of the architecture, the space in the bedrooms, the charm of the Mesdames or even the recalcitrance of some of the waiters; it is the old park land that they are set in or the village that they back on to, the smell of roses through your bedroom window or the fact that the coffee is so strong that it gives you wide open eyes for four hours afterwards; the lack of fellow guests or the roar of a Gallic row in the next room. One of the primary charms is that there is no need to grit your teeth and scream through the night, tailing the red snake and hurtling towards the white light rush, nor make a great detour to find a respite from the road.

For every good find there is another that will fill you with horror, like the monk mad Madame in Nuits-St-George; the place where the furniture was covered in cling film and the food just as thick in aspic; the time when the brioche were not so much Kleenex as escapees from an arms depot and the one where the resident cats made love and war all night.

The safest way to avoid disasters is to know what you want and then ring and find out if they have it or anything close to your needs. Every book shop now has several of the glossy guides that cover the ins and outs of châteaux hopping, the most succinct probably being Relais and Châteaux, produced by the people who give the places their confort grading, though be wary as they frequently soar into verbal orbit in advertorial fashion.

A twenty-four hour gap between a meeting and your return, a day‘s delay in getting home at the end of a holiday, a long week end or just a short escape in the middle of a grey week—all good reasons to find a châteaux off the main drag. If there is no reason to stop and stay, try to invent one, because it seems a sad omission to waste the divine intervention that plopped the péages around so many fine hostelleries, manoirs and châteaux.

(originally published in The European in 1993)