Halfway between Avignon and Nîmes, Montfrin Castle dominates the village of the same name, at the end of a rise lined with acanthus and almond trees. Every winter, Jean-René de Fleurieu, 73, hides with his cats and a pile of books in a well-heated room in an old house classified as a historical monument.
And, every spring, the owner of the place – he prefers the word “guardian” – comes out of this lethargy to train the olive trees and prepare the farm for the summer invasion of his friends. “After loneliness, exuberance, return to social life,” summarizes the one that twenty years ago hosted the thirty actors from Ariane Mnouchkine’s theater group, who attended the Avignon Festival. In the old chapel, under a pointed roof, the summer kitchen seats ten guests, not counting the two donkeys that come to collect melon peels.
During our visit, at cherry season in June, it is again in the humble winter kitchen that we share the landowner’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. .
With a soft voice and a patriarchal beard, Jean-René de Fleurieu uncorks a wine from the house he named after To our loves, in homage to the film by Maurice Pialat. Thirty years have passed since this descendant of the Servan-Schreiber clan, once a traveling companion of the designer Agnès b., with whom he has two daughters, and then a producer of underground films, reinvented himself as a family farmer. castle. On the fertile banks of the Rhône, between Provence and Languedoc, today he cultivates 180 hectares of vines and 120 of olive trees, all organically. Its olive mill presses around 2,000 tons 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 century.my 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, co-founder of the business daily HE echoes, He offers the property to seduce Suzanne Crémieux, a daughter of notable Jews from the region destined to become senator of the Gard thanks to the votes of the Protestants of Cévennes.
The ancestor turned it into a model of modern comfort, one of the only castles equipped with electricity, as well as a telephone and 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 keep all the rooms habitable. » To do this, it is installed here and there. “ Sometimes I come to sleep here he said, opening the door to a beautiful, somewhat monastic room. When the rooms are lived in, you can feel it. »
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