Halfway between Avignon and Nîmes, the Château de Montfrin dominates the village of the same name, at the end of a climb lined with acanthus and almond trees. Every winter, Jean-René de Fleurieu, 73, hides away with his cats and a pile of books in a well-heated room of the old house classified as a historic monument.
And, every spring, the master of the place – he prefers the word ” guardian “ – comes out of this lethargy to train the olive trees and prepare the estate for the summer invasion of friends. “After solitude, exuberance, return to social life”, sums up the one who twenty years ago hosted the thirty actors from Ariane Mnouchkine’s theater troupe, who came for the Avignon Festival. In the old chapel, under an ogive ceiling, the summer kitchen can accommodate up to ten guests, not counting the two donkeys who come to collect melon rinds.
During our visit, at cherry time, in June, it is again in the humble winter kitchen that we share the squire’s lunch: large white asparagus drizzled with the castle’s olive oil, pâtés en croute from the Nîmes market and the first melon of the season.
Soft voice and patriarchal beard, Jean-René de Fleurieu uncorks a house wine that he named To our loves, in homage to the film by Maurice Pialat. It has been thirty years since this descendant of the Servan-Schreiber clan, once a traveling companion of the fashion designer Agnès b., with whom he has two daughters, and then a producer of underground films, reinvented himself as a farmer in the family castle. On the fertile banks of the Rhône, between Provence and Languedoc, he today cultivates 180 hectares of vines and 120 of olive trees, all organically. Its oil mill presses around 2,000 tonnes of olives per year, making it the first in France.
The ancestor makes it a model of modern comfort
A heavy door in which a large key is turned. Inside the room, trompe-l’oeil pieces made in the 19th centurye century by Tuscan masons and rows of bedrooms, boudoirs, bathrooms with enameled cast iron bathtubs… Almost nothing has changed since the interwar period, when his grandfather Robert Servan-Schreiber , the co-founder of the economic daily THE Echoes, offers the estate to seduce Suzanne Crémieux, a daughter of notable Jews from the region destined to become senator of Gard thanks to the votes of Cévennes Protestants.
The ancestor made it a model of modern comfort, one of the only castles equipped with electricity, as well as a telephone and an intercom system. Today the house is aging “in harmony” with its occupant, as the latter says. “Everything is worn out. There are problems everywhere, with water and heating, but I try to make sure that all the rooms remain habitable. » To this end, he takes up residence here and there. “ I sometimes come to sleep here, he said, pushing open the door to a beautiful, somewhat monastic room. When the rooms are inhabited, you can feel it. »
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