"Courances" éd. Flammarion Learn more...

Recent history
- By Laure Stasi, art historian and Valentine de Ganay

After having been abandoned for forty-two years, Courances had become a ruin; a tree had even grown in the dining room and had broken through the roof. Baron Samuel de Haber's acquisition of the property in 1872 saved it. Following the example of the Rothschild family, the banker had moved to Paris in the middle of the century. Anti-Semitism was certainly one of the reasons for his exile; another was his supposed love affair with the daughter of the Grand Duke of Baden. Haber enjoyed a considerable fortune, and as a talented financier, helped negotiate the debt payment for the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The marriage of his only daughter to the Comte Octave de Béhague, who was from an old noble family, brought him closer to the French nobility. With this union, the family adopted an aristocratic lifestyle made possible by his country home. In order to restore this château, the Béhague family architect was summoned. Hippolyte Destailleur was under the orders of both the Baron and his son-in-law for this construction site, which prepared him for his future project at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The scholarly Comte Octave de Béhague wanted to preserve the original appearance of the building, while the flamboyant Baron de Haber fancied a monumental copy of the horseshoe-shaped staircase at Fontainebleau. This bold gesture illustrates what the property meant to the Baron: a social showcase. Few people during this period had the means to restore such a large property. It took the millions of a banker. Haber brought Courances back to life, as did Hottinguer with Guermantes and Sommier with Vaux-le-Vicomte.

Berthe (1868-1940) and Martine (1870-1939) de Béhague were already orphans when they inherited the property from their grandfather in 1892. Berthe, the eldest, received Courances. Just as Baron de Haber had wanted, Courances seemed to come straight out of a fairy tale. It had that lavish air to it that was so unique to the nineteenth century, with, for example, trout brought in from Fribourg to swim in the pure water of the ponds. From 1899 to 1914, Berthe and her husband, Comte Jean de Ganay, spent a lot of time with the landscape designers, the Duchêne father and son, to continue the embellishment of the gardens. They seemed to have always opted for simplicity and sobriety. Berthe, however, in opposition to their French-style restoration of the grounds, invented the surprising Japanese garden. They acquired the Fleury land in 1896 to expand the hunting territory of Courances and transferred this property to Martine in 1910. She restored the site without the assistance of the leading landscape designers or architects and lived there until 1927. It was Martine de Béhague who created the foundations for the famous Potager on the Fleury grounds, which is anything but a vegetable garden, with its Persian garden. (She used there the porphyry that she had brought back from Syria for her private theatre in Paris, at the time the largest in Europe, the Salle Byzantine, in what is currently the Roumanian Embassy.) Martine de Béhague remains a famous figure in the museum world. Rumours throughout Paris claimed she purchased one object every day. A visit to the Louvre bears witness to the diversity of her taste, from Watteau's Les Deux Cousines to an Egyptian silver figurine, a coffee mill used by Madame de Pompadour and a Byzantine steatite bas-relief. She donated the frame for the Mona Lisa, and it was Martine de Béhague who saved the Hôtel de Sully on Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris. Martine de Béhague overshadowed Berthe as she travelled around the world aboard her sailboat, the Nirvana, amassing her eclectic collections and pursuing artistic projects that still fascinate people to this day. Berthe nevertheless occupied her predestined role in such an exemplary way that she has become an archetypal figure of the aristocracy during the Belle Epoque years.

From 1944 to 1946, the outbuildings housed an American disciplinary camp. The owners of the château were still confined to restricted quarters within the main house. A second ammunition depot exploded accidentally, causing even greater damage. It was at this time that virtually all the furniture disappeared. In 1948, M. Rameau, the architect responsible for the upkeep of the château, estimated the cost of restoring the property at 88 million francs. The government offered compensation of 7.7 million. From 1949 to 1955, Field Marshall Montgomery, assistant commander of the NATO troops based in Fontainebleau, was the next to move into the "noble" floors : he left the flagpole that still carries the colours of the Ganay family and the large snooker table.

In 1948, the entire Courances estate was placed on the inventaire supplémentaire of the Monuments Historiques. The Marquis de Ganay, Hubert (Berthe's eldest son and Martine's godson), with his son Jean-Louis (born in 1922), married to Philippine de Noailles (born in 1925), set to work to remove all traces of the successive occupations, as well as certain elements that had been added by the architect Destailleur. In 1978, the Vallée de l'Ecole became a registered site. In 1982, the Château de Courances was open to the public (the gardens had been since the war). In 1983, the entire estate was classified as a Historical Monument..