Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France

#29 Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France by Thad Carheart is about la mémoire des lieux or the memory of a place. Carheart and his family, father, mother, and four siblings, lived in France at Fontainebleau for three years during the 1950s while his father worked as a staff officer for NATO. The chapters go back and forth between Carheart's memories, a bit of history, and recent renovations to preserve the chateau. Construction of the chateau was begun in 1137, fifty years before the Louvre and more than five hundred years before Versailles was constructed. Francois Premier, Henri II, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, and Napoleon III have all left their mark on Fontainebleau.

I liked the chapters about France in the 1950s the best, especially the anecdotes about school. For example, Thad was in kindergarten and he and his fellow pupils learned to add and subtract using bottles of wine, (my uncle gives three bottles of wine to my parents who already had five bottles...). Or filling pages in the specially lined notebooks with rows and rows of "i's" or "u's". The French have a very distinct form of handwriting that everyone learns.  I also liked the chapters about fencing; Thad's father was a professional fencer. And the family's camping trip to Rome was memorable as well.

Fontainebleau is on my list of places to go on my next trip to France.

Here's a link to the Chateau's website :Musee Chateau Fontainebleau