French castle from the16th century, honoring the history of the family in exile

For centuries, owners of ancestral estates have sought to preserve within their walls the worlds they have lost. The 1,200-square-foot Grand Salon of Château Montalembert in Meaux, France, is lined with Zuber wallpaper from 1818, depicting views ofRome and Switzerland, and furnished with a collection of French and Chinese antiques.

The pain of exile has inspired many great works of art. Pablo Neruda published "Canto General," his poignant book of poems about life underground, after being expelled from the Chilean Senate in 1948; Oscar Wilde wrote the crystal-clear prose text "De Profundis" during his exile in Reading Gaol in England for sodomy. Being forced to flee from Germany to Paris, and then to New York during the rise of the Nazis, was a catalyst for the artist George Grosz and his 1944 masterpiece "Cain, or Hitler in Hell."

Homes can also embody pain and the potential rebirth that may follow the expulsion of their owners. For Nicolas Gedroic, the current caretaker of the 16th-century Château Montalembert, located on more than 500 acres in Mech, an inaccessible commune near the French border with Switzerland, expulsion has become a source of beauty and, paradoxically, permanence. Loss and longing, as well as the desire to reclaim the past and preserve it forever, have shaped the 22,000-square-foot house, clad in blue-gray local stonework with traditional white wooden shutters.

At first, there was the experience of an early heir to the house.

Baron Alexandre-Nicolas-Joseph Guio de Mesh, a nobleman at the court of King Louis XVI. The baron, who moved from Château Montalembert to the Palace of Versailles, located 275 miles away, in the 1770s, was elevated to marquis but was soon expelled due to a minor insult directed at the regent's extravagant spending. Undeterred but shortened, Guio de Mesh and his wife Louise Marie Catherine Geneviève de La Touche returned to the abandoned confines of their ancestral estate, which they transformed to reflect the life that had been denied to them. A landscape designer created a 12-acre formal garden inspired by the majestic parterres of the famous palace, with neatly trimmed hedges, and indoors, the marquis installed intricate parquet floors with interwoven squares that had been made fashionable by Louis XIV - the effect became known as parquet de Versailles. The couple commissioned countless decorations popular among the Bourbons, including richly carved cornices above numerous sitting and sleeping alcoves. "If they hadn't been expelled by the king, the interiors would have been completely different," says Gedroitz, 59, sitting in an 18th-century armchair in the Petit Salon, his feet clad in slippers to avoid scratching the parquet, light streaming through tall windows. It could have been a less rococo fantasy, but perhaps not as exceptionally thought out or well built.

Maternal grandfather of Gedroitsa

The Belgian diplomat Count Guillaume de Hemricourt de Grun, whose family inherited the house from the marquis at the end of the 18th century, inherited it in 1923 and soon added a Versailles-inspired pool and a sandstone fountain by Pierre France. However, it was under the guidance of Gedroic, who took over the management of the castle in 2008 from his aunt, that the house reached its aesthetic apotheosis. To the layers of French tradition - the moderate style of early Baroque, the rich ornamentation of the 18th century, and the revivalist passion embodied by his grandfather - he added the history of his father's exile from the other side of the world.

Father Gedroica

Of Lithuanian descent, he was a descendant of the royal Russian family. His father, Prince Nikolai Vladimirovich Gedroits, was a member of the White Army, an anti-Bolshevik movement, which meant he experienced exile on an epic scale, forced to leave Russia and move to Serbia in 1920, a few years after his name day, when the tsar and his family were executed in a basement during the Russian Revolution. The prince died from war wounds shortly after the birth of Gedroits' father, Alexis, who later became a professor of Russian literature and a translator.

By 2005, when mid-20th century design became popular and the market for European antique furniture had died, Gedroitz downsized the gallery and turned his attention to the castle. His instinct told him to connect two periods that shaped the legacy of the house: the pre-revolutionary years in both France and Russia, separated by more than 100 years. While he, his wife Solina, 54, and their three now-adult children spent most of their time in a Victorian house in London, they spent summers at Château Montalembert, just as Gedroitz did in his childhood. As a boy, he followed his grandfather around the estate as the count surveyed the land and consulted with foresters about how many trees needed to be cut down that season. Listening to Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major from 1798, he read his grandfather's gilded stories about the French Revolution. "Some people want to go to Disneyland," he says, "but every summer I dreamed of coming back here."

Now, updated with new plumbing, double-glazed windows, and a black tiled roof gleaming in the late spring sunlight, the estate is adorned with furniture that would be quite at home in both royal summer residences and in the pre-Napoleonic era. Up the winding Renaissance stone staircase from the entrance hall is the Grand Salon, the size of a ballroom and decorated with vibrant scenes depicting panoramic views of Switzerland andRome. These were installed by the marquis at some point between 1818 and 1830. In the middle of the room are a pair of Louis XVI armchairs upholstered in lemon-yellow silk; Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle sat in them in November 1944 when the castle was on the front line of the war; they were invited by French military officer Jean de Lattre de Tassigny to discuss the strategy for liberating Alsace from the Germans.

Below, the former bedroom is now called the Russian Room. The bed remains, upholstered in blue moire silk and tucked away in a snow-white Baroque niche adorned with faded floral wallpaper from the 18th century, but the room mainly serves as a showcase for the most valuable Russian antiques of the Gedroits collection (although the massive mahogany secretary with numerous hidden drawers, made by a student of Catherine the Great's favorite carpenter and named Gedroits the Elephant, is too large to fit). There are Empire-style armchairs with bronze star motifs on intricately carved backs and an 18th-century writing desk by a tall window dressed in white silk, overlooking the formal garden.

On both sides of the room, there are custom-made glass armoires, crafted in London from mahogany and brass to resemble those seen in a Russian palace, standing opposite each other. Inside them are dozens of toy soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars. As a child, at the age of 7 or 8, he painted the models himself, and when his son, now 20, was the same age, Gedroits taught the boy the intricate technique; perhaps one day this could be taught to his grandson as well. He is not bothered that the figures belong to a period different from that of Louis XIV's France or Tsarist Russia. After all, Napoleon himself knew a thing or two about exile.