It’s not often that one gets to sleep the night in a castle. I feel like I’m a character from a childhood TV show, where they spend the night in a department store… only replace the “department store” with “museum.” I honestly feel like I’m living in one of the regal display rooms of the Hermitage… but ok, alright, castle is a slight exaggeration. Perhaps ye-olde country retreat would suffice.

For all those who haven’t been slavishly following my blog, waiting on the next posting with bated breath, I’ll just recap. I’m working as an au pair in Paris, and the grandparents live in the aforementioned Jane Austen-esque manor, just outside of Paris in untainted natural seclusion. It’s in a tiny village oblivious to the external suburban sprawl, and this property an oasis oblivious even to the tiny village.

When I first came here, it was during the warm extended daylight of summer. Now the air is crisp and all the russet leaves are falling, carpeting the immaculate green lawns and interspersing with the mushrooms in the woodlands. Of an afternoon, the sun sets on the surrounding manors, elevated on a surrounding hill and basking in the golden light, the peaks of their turrets visible above the autumnal tree line. On the other side, the spire of the local church is visible – and audible too, as the bells toll regularly, ringing out to mark the various hours and occasions.

There are perhaps thirty rooms spread across three levels, and the floor plan is long and narrow. The façade is dominated by squares of sandstone and the panels of French-shuttered windows. Whilst the majority of the building dates from the nineteenth century, there is one tower remaining from the 1650 original.

Pick a room, any room, and there are dark oils of the life of the aristocracy, watercolour tributes to hunting (the one in my room reads ‘Northampton Grand National Steeple Chase, 1840’ and I can’t help wondering if someone brought the poster back as a souvenir), and tapestries glorifying some sort of romanticised pre-revolutionary peasantry. I think this is the only time in my life that I’ve eaten “game” (it was wild boar, by the way).