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Ever since we started sharing the château on Instagram and YouTube, one question keeps showing up in the comments, usually from people who sound like they’d quite like the answer to be yes.

Is it haunted?

It’s a reasonable thing to ask. The house has been standing since the 1600s, there’s a chapel hidden in the forest with its bell still hanging in the tower, and Halloween falls on the night before la Toussaint, when many French families carry chrysanthemums to the graves of the people they’ve lost, so if anyone in this house was ever going to be up and about, it would be this week.

So for our first Halloween at the château, we went looking, and I’ll get to that. But first, the pumpkins! Because one of us has accused the rest of us of cheating, and I think the public deserves to hear both sides.

Before the cold

October started fairly mild, and we made the most of it while it lasted. The cyclamen were blooming, and the kids spent most of their free time on the swing.

The swing deserves a small introduction. It began life as a Fermob 1900, the classic French garden chair, built to sit on a gravel terrace beside a small table and with an even smaller coffee. Ours has had its legs removed and an arch fitted over the top, and it now hangs from a tree. The kids love it and are on it constantly.

Then Sean’s sister, Hilary, came to stay for a couple of weeks, and the kids pretty much annexed her on arrival.

She made pop-up books with them, little handmade books where a magical creature unfolds out of the page. London’s featured a dragon and a kraken. Léonie’s featured a unicorn, a fairy, and a mermaid. They colored in every creature themselves, and then chose special paper for the covers. Hilary even added her whimsical handwriting for the titles.

If you want to make them with your own kids, here are some of the tutorial videos she used:

Tutorial 1

Tutorial 2

You can explore Matthew Reinhart’s channel, where he has several pop-up book tutorials. They’re pretty amazing.

The pumpkins (and the accusation)

We went a little more modern this year. Sean took the tops off our Halloween pumpkins with a jigsaw, then cleared out the insides with an electric mixer. It sounded exactly as alarming as you’re imagining, but it saved a lot of time and a lot of wrist effort.

Our son wanted nothing to do with any of the power tools. He announced that his pumpkin would be fully human made, refused all electrical assistance, and did every single step himself. And he did it! We were genuinely impressed.

Then, pumpkin finished, he informed the rest of us that, by using the power tools, we had cheated.

I’d like to tell you I mounted a defense, but I didn’t. He’s a tiny bit right, depending on your own morals regarding tools to carve pumpkins. His is entirely fait main (handmade), and he would like that on the record.

The final lineup: London’s dragon (human made, as you’ve heard). My witch hat, Hilary’s cat sitting on the moon, and Léonie’s little cat, which she drew and carved entirely by herself.

And then there was Sean’s.

He’d recently taken a photo of the full moon rising over the château, and he used it as his model. A freehand drawing first, then a slow, painstaking carve, until there it was: our little castle, lit from the inside, in pumpkin form. He’s a really good artist, and I love watching him make things.

When it got dark that evening, Sean carried a projector outside, and we put on their witch and wizard costumes to make some magic with shadows and pointy hats.

Behind the wall: witches flying across a 17th-century façade, ghosts in the tall windows, the moon photo, a unicorn birthday with cupcakes on a carousel, our family’s carrot cake recipe, and our ghost hunt, with the answer to your question.

The rest of this post is for Supporting Members. Castle Diaries is the real-time record of restoring a 17th-century French château with two small children and a husband who owns a jigsaw. Supporting Members get every post in full, every photo, and all the extras (this one includes our family’s carrot cake recipe). If you’ve enjoyed the story so far, this is the best way to keep it going.

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In about ten days, we will celebrate Halloween the way Americans do, carving pumpkins and decorating the château with an enthusiasm that our French neighbors will likely observe with polite curiosity.

And on the 1st, many families here, especially older ones, will visit the cemetery with flowers. Drive past any village cemetery that week and you’ll likely see it covered in chrysanthemums.

I didn’t realize at first that these two things are connected. “Halloween” comes from All Hallows’ Eve, the evening before All Saints’ Day (“hallows” is an old word for saints), which in France is called la Toussaint.

If you’re new here, hello! I’m Kamille. We’re an American family who moved to rural France and then, against all reasonable advice, bought a small château. The essays here are free, and I’d love to have you along.

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Halloween, with a pinch of salt

When we lived in Los Angeles, October at our local Whole Foods meant a full pumpkin lineup outside the door. Carving pumpkins, mini pumpkins, warty ones, pale ones, and the big flat fairytale pumpkins, all arranged so you could build a Pinterest porch or an Instagram-ready fall table in a single trip. When we went back for a visit last October, the inside was even more committed: pumpkin-flavored everything, including several things I’m still not convinced should contain pumpkin.

In France, Halloween is a ‘pinch.’ A few pumpkins appear in the shops. A paper bat or two shows up in a bakery window. In towns, some children go door to door saying “Des bonbons ou un sort!” (candy or a curse, which is a slightly more ominous translation of trick-or-treat than I’d expected). But there are no 12-foot skeletons in the front gardens, and nobody’s porch looks like a Disney haunted house.

Halloween is a fairly recent import here. It arrived in a big commercial rush at the end of the 1990s, helped along by brands like France Télécom (which released a Halloween-themed phone called, yes I promise you, the Olaween). Then the enthusiasm cooled, and it settled into what it is now: something for children, mostly, done in moderation and regarded by most adults as a commercial holiday.

Our first October here, I unpacked three large boxes of Halloween decorations I’d shipped across an ocean and discovered we were pretty much the only house in the village using them. I have made my peace with this. Every family needs a thing, and this one is ours I suppose.

“Well,” he said. “There are many.”

In our first fall here, we asked a French friend what the word for pumpkin was.

“Well,” he said. “There are many.”

There’s the citrouille, the bright orange Halloween one, with a hard, ridged stem and stringy flesh. It’s the one you carve. There’s the potiron, rounder and flatter, with a soft, spongy stem, which goes into soup. There’s the potimarron, small and red-orange, which tastes faintly of chestnut and might be the most useful vegetable in a French October. And then there’s courge, the umbrella word that covers all of them, plus anything else vaguely squash-shaped.

The thing to understand is that in France, pumpkin is a vegetable. It goes in soup. You won’t find it in your coffee, and you can’t buy canned pumpkin purée at all. When we want to bake anything pumpkin, my sister-in-law tucks a few cans into her suitcase on her visits, which is the most American act of love I know.

Some of the fanciest pumpkins in that Whole Foods display were French heirloom varieties all along. The tan, deeply ribbed fairytale ones are Musquée de Provence. The red Cinderella ones are Rouge vif d’Étampes (which makes sense, really, since Cinderella is French, too). It was a Frenchman, Charles Perrault, who first turned a pumpkin into a carriage, back in 1697 (in his version, it’s a citrouille.)

The French have been doing magic with pumpkins for a very long time. They just usually turn them into soup.

We’re carving, crafting and decorating the château for Halloween all week. Next week, I’m sharing all of it in Castle Diaries, my behind-the-scenes journal for Supporting Members, along with our Halloween episode on YouTube. Become a Supporting Member and it lands straight in your inbox.

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November 1st: the flowers you never bring to dinner

La Toussaint, or ‘All Saints’ Day,’ falls on November 1st, and it’s a national public holiday here. Banks and many shops close, and families travel to visit the graves of the people they’ve lost.

Technically, the day for remembering the dead is November 2nd, le jour des morts. But since the 1st is the day off, that’s when most families go. In the days around it, cemeteries all over France fill up with flowers, and almost all of them are chrysanthemums.

There’s a practical reason for this. Chrysanthemums are one of the few flowers still blooming in November, and they hold up in the cold. After the First World War, they covered the graves of millions of soldiers, and the connection stuck. By November 1919, Le Monde (the biggest newspaper here) was describing tombstones “wearing a white chrysanthemum.”

The result is that in France, chrysanthemums are associated with one thing - the dead. If you take away only one useful fact from this essay, let it be this one: never bring chrysanthemums to a French dinner party. As far as your hostess is concerned, you’ve arrived with a funeral arrangement, and she will spend the evening wondering who died.

The tradition is fading a little. Fewer families make the cemetery trip every year than used to, and the people buying the pots of chrysanthemums skew older. But drive past any village cemetery in the first days of November and you’ll still see it: rows and rows of graves in gold and deep red, the brightest place in town.

So on the night of October 31st, there are costumes and candy. On the morning of the 1st, there are flowers on the graves. Two holidays a few hours apart, both about the dead, one with sweets and one with flowers.

Les vacances de la Toussaint

We moved to France in August of 2023. Our kids started French school the very next month in September, and then, just as everyone was finding their rhythm, the school closed for two weeks. Nobody had warned us about this. In California, the first real break of the year came at Thanksgiving, and it was essentially a long weekend.

It turns out the French school year runs on a rhythm of roughly six or seven weeks of school followed by two weeks off, all year long. The Toussaint break was stretched to a full two weeks in 2012, partly to even out that rhythm. This year it runs from October 17th to November 2nd, and it’s the same dates across the whole country.

Now, this isn’t necessarily ideal for every family. If both parents work outside the home, two weeks off every couple of months means a lot of childcare to arrange. But for many families here, this is grandparent time. Kids go to stay with their grandparents for a week, or the grandparents come to them, and it’s built into the rhythm of the year so completely that nobody has to scramble for it.

For our family, it has become one of my favorite things about living here.

Six or seven weeks is about as long as anyone can go at full speed. The breaks arrive just as the kids are getting tired, and as we are, too. They give everyone time to absorb everything that just happened, and to sleep in, before going back. It even gives us a two-week break from virus exposure! The kids return to school rested and ready. And usually, so do the parents.

And this one, the Toussaint break, might be the loveliest of the year. It’s the start of fall and the start of cozy season, and it feels like the whole country is settling into it together: the first fires, the soups, the markets full of squash. Everyone slows down at the same time.

If you’re visiting or moving to France in late October

A few things worth knowing:

• November 1st is a public holiday. Banks and many shops will be closed, and some restaurants too. Plan your groceries accordingly.

• The Toussaint school break means busier trains and roads, especially on the first and last weekends. Book early if you’re traveling, and expect family-friendly destinations to be full.

• Never give chrysanthemums as a gift. Not to a host, not to a friend, not to anyone who is alive.

• Buy the right pumpkin. A citrouille for carving, a potiron or potimarron for cooking. If you want to carve, buy early, because they’re not everywhere.

• If you live in a village, keep a few sweets by the door on the 31st. Not every child trick-or-treats here, but some do, and you don’t want to be caught empty-handed by a small vampire.

What we’re doing this year

This year is our first Halloween at the château. Given that Halloween only really arrived in France in the late 1990s, and the previous owners only ever came in summer, it may well be the château’s first Halloween ever.

After more than three centuries, it’s about to meet its first jack-o’-lantern.

À bientôt,
Kamille

If you enjoyed this, follow along. My essays about life in France are free, always, and land in your inbox twice a month.

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And if you’d like to come inside the château, Castle Diaries is where I share the renovation as it happens: the rooms, the real costs, the decisions and the occasional disaster. Next up, later this week: Halloween at the château. Supporting Members get every chapter, twice a month, straight to their inbox.

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The taxe foncière is the French property tax. It arrives every autumn, right around the time the leaves start falling, as if France has decided the mood is already a little melancholy, so why not. Ours came to nearly €5,000. I paid it, closed the laptop, and sat there for a minute with a feeling I’ve been circling for a few weeks now.

We have spent a lot of money this year, and I can’t really see any of it.

I’m aware that “my château pool is behind schedule” is not a sentence that earns a lot of sympathy, and I’m not asking for any. But if you’ve ever spent your savings on a new roof, or a water heater, or the sewer line under the front yard, instead of on the vacation you’d been planning, or on a beautiful bedroom makeover, you already know exactly the feeling I mean. This one just happens to have turrets.

So here’s where the money went.

Two septic systems. One for the château and one for the coach house, both installed this spring, both completely invisible, both among the most expensive things on the property so far. When I wrote about the septic going in, I said that old buildings get restored from the inside out, with the invisible things going first. I meant it, and I still mean it, but I didn’t fully appreciate how it would feel to spend that kind of money on something whose entire job is to stay underground, never be thought about, and never be seen by anyone ever again. And all of this invisible work came with a bonus: the septic also took two of our prettiest stretches of lawn down with it, just in time for a summer of five heatwaves. We’ve been coaxing them back ever since (with mixed results).

We’ve been editing our YouTube videos about the septic installation this month, which means I’ve spent several evenings rewatching a digger dig a hole. The installation was finished months ago, but watching it again was like flipping through the photo album of a very expensive year and finding that every single picture is of, well, dirt.

There is no big reveal for a septic tank. Nobody plays the Fixer Upper music. Nobody walks into the back field and gasps in awe.

The coach house. It looks lovely, truly, and I’m very proud of the work we put into it. It’s cleaned and decorated and furnished down to the sheets and the teaspoons, and it has started earning a little money from guests, which helps. We just don’t live in it, so it’s a stretch to say we can fully enjoy the fruits of our labor. I go over sometimes to check on something and stand in a room I love, and then walk back to the château, where the radiators are still glaring at me, and the horror film lighting in our tiny galley kitchen is now flickering, just in time for Halloween.

The pool. It is October, and the pool is…a hole. A large chasm, if you will, surrounded by dirt.

It’s a very well-engineered hole. It has a concrete shell, and orange markers, and an air of great potential. It does not have a liner, or water, or a cover, or the travertine terrace I have been picturing in my head since (roughly) March.

Below: why the pool is still a hole (it involves a drought and a very long line of dominoes), the beautiful kitchen we said no to, and what all this invisible work actually costs in rural France.

Castle Diaries is my renovation journal for paid Supporting Members. Twice a month, I take you inside the château: the plans, the money and the decisions, as we make them.

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In Los Angeles, fall usually arrived as a beverage. First the pumpkin spice latte came back. Then a candle called something like Harvest Cashmere showed up at Target. Then it was 85 degrees F on Halloween and everyone wore a chunky knit anyway, in blissful (and sweaty) rebellion.

We now live in a petite castle in the northwest of France, where the seasons are real, which is one of my favorite things about living here. Summer doesn’t just ‘switch off.’ You really get to watch it slowly turn into fall, in a hundred small ways. This is our fourth autumn here, and I still notice every single one of them, and treasure them.

I’m aware that ‘autumn in France is lovely’ is not breaking news. But nobody ever mentioned that part of it involves learning which chestnuts will poison your kids, so I think there’s still a little room.

Here are the small and lovely things that tell me autumn has arrived in France.

If you’re new here, hello! I’m Kamille. We’re an American family who moved to rural France and then, against all reasonable advice, bought a small château. The essays here are free, and I’d love to have you along.

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1. The light changes (and then the fog moves in)

France is famous for its autumn light, and it earns the reputation. The angle sort of shifts, and everything turns a little gold around the edges.

The trees change color properly here, similar to the East Coast in the U.S. You feel the temperature start dropping (especially at night) and the days get shorter, calling for more evening mood lighting and candles. And then the leaves start to fall. When there’s a soft breeze, they drift and spin down so slowly that they look almost like little gold stars falling out of the sky.

And then there’s the fog. Last week, when we took the kids to school, it was sitting halfway up the trees, as though someone had set it down carefully and forgotten to come back for it. All four of us were marveling at it. It looked like we’d driven into a magical land, and it made the 6-minute school run quite mystical.

Then today we lit our first fire of the year, which really feels like the official arrival of fall. Autumn has officially entered the building, cozy season has begun, and there is no going back to sandals.

2. The cyclamen appear

Ah, the cyclamen. The flower that gives you a little boost of magic just when you’d stopped expecting any.

I’d never noticed cyclamen before moving to France. We arrived three years ago in August, so we skipped the gentle introduction and went straight into fall. We were renting a farmhouse on the grounds of a château, and one morning in late September I looked out our bedroom window and there was a small carpet of them under the trees.

They’re low and delicate, in purples and pinks and whites, and they love the shade, so they tuck themselves under trees and make themselves comfortable between all the fallen leaves. All year long you would have no idea they’re there. Then every other flower in the garden says its goodbyes for the year, and that’s when the cyclamen decide to make their entrance.

When we first came to see our château, it was September, too. There was a patch of cyclamen blooming under some trees by the house, and we were delighted out of all proportion. One of our favorite little delights of the farmhouse was going to be at our château too. It felt like the château had called the farmhouse for a reference.

3. The apples (best of my life, no contest)

France’s tourism board calls the apple the star of autumn, and I’m a big fan of the nickname. It’s apple-picking season here, and the best apples I have ever eaten in my life were French. Truly - hands down. It isn’t even close.

They came from the walled garden next to the farmhouse we rented before we bought the château. It was an incredible garden, and it had so many apple trees, of every variety you could think of. In our second year we finally ventured out to pick some, and then we simply could not stop eating them. Apples for breakfast, apples for lunch, apples at dinner (which is not a meal where apples usually get a speaking part). Sean made applesauce, several times. When my in-laws came to visit, my mother-in-law made an apple tart that was, and I don’t use this phrase lightly, to die for.

Our own apple trees at the château didn’t produce this year. They’re…thinking about it. In the meantime, the shops fill up with apple desserts and the cider comes out, and this part of France (northwest) takes its cider seriously enough to make Martinelli’s look like a juice box.

4. Chestnuts everywhere (and the other chestnuts)

Some of this is our region, but in the fall and winter there are chestnuts absolutely everywhere. Chestnut trees are hugely popular in France: in cities, in forests, along roads, everywhere. Recently we were in a completely random parking lot in our nearest city, grabbing groceries, and our daughter just started collecting the chestnuts all over the ground, lifting the bottom of her dress to make a little carrying hammock for them (because she had too many to simply fit in her hands).

In our very first fall in France, our landlord at the farmhouse took us on a mini adventure into her woods to gather chestnuts. We brought baskets, put on our rain boots, and ventured out. It was so beautiful, and it was also where I learned (at the age of 30-something), that there are two kinds of chestnuts and one of them will make you very sick. Until then, my entire chestnut education had come from Nat King Cole and a pouch of roasted, peeled ones from Trader Joe's.

The one you want is the châtaigne. It grows inside a husk covered in long, dense spines, (like a very small, very angry hedgehog), and inside there are sometimes a few nuts packed together, flattish on one side, with a little pointed tip. The one you don’t want is the marron d’Inde, the horse chestnut, from the big ornamental trees you see in parks and town squares. Its husk has shorter spikes spaced further apart, and inside there’s usually just one round, glossy nut that looks so perfect and so edible you feel almost betrayed when you learn it’s toxic.

To make this more fun, the roasted chestnuts sold on street corners are called marrons chauds, the sweet chestnut spread in the jar is crème de marrons, and both are made from châtaignes. Meanwhile, the poisonous ones in the park? Everyone calls those marrons too.

Our landlord had one more instruction. You have to gather them at exactly the right time, she told us, because if you wait too long, the sangliers will eat them all.

Sangliers are wild boar. They’re very real, they’re very fond of chestnuts, and they’re about to become relevant.

5. La chasse

The château behind our farmhouse had a large private forest, which we'd been wandering through freely for weeks. Then, in early October, our landlord sent us a text: Don't walk in the woods today. La chasse has begun.

We had no idea what that meant, so we did what any reasonable person does with a cryptic message from their landlord - we Googled it. And we discovered that la chasse (literally, the hunt) is hunting season, and in rural France, it is an institution.

And then, pretty soon, we saw it ourselves. Right next to the farmhouse, a crew showed up: about ten men, middle-aged to older, in orange vests and flat caps and tall rubber boots, guns slung over their shoulders, hunting dogs everywhere.

They were out to get the sanglier, which France actively encourages. The wolves that once kept them in check disappeared from most of the country about a century ago, the wild boar population has exploded since, and they have very strong feelings about other people's crops (they do tens of millions of euros of damage to farmland every year, and they cause around 30,000 road collisions a year).

Once you know about the hunt, you start seeing it all over the forests here, mostly in the form of miradors, the raised wooden hunting seats that look like lifeguard towers that wandered into the woods and decided to stay. Baywatch, if everyone were waiting for a pig.

In our second year, Sean and I were invited to a hunting lunch at someone’s farmhouse. We felt extremely out of place (partly because we are not hunters and partly because we are Americans, which meant we had dressed for a nice lunch). Everyone else was wearing their actual hunting clothes (quite charming, in a muddy, tweedy, dirty-chic sort of way). We stood out like a pair of sore thumbs in our stylish fall apparel.

It was cold outside and cozy inside, with a lovely autumn atmosphere. There was a lot of wine and a LOT of meat (served mostly with a side of meat). We fumbled our way through entirely French conversations and ended up having a truly nice time.

Castle Diaries is where I take you inside the château: the rooms we're restoring, the before-and-afters, the decisions we're making and the ones we got wrong. Two posts a month, for Supporting Members.

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6. A mushroom with a very unfortunate name

On one of our early walks through the forest by the farmhouse, we came across a giant white mushroom, unlike anything we’d ever seen. When we pointed it out to our landlord, she picked it, handed it to the kids, and announced: “Pet de loup. It’s delicious.”

Pet de loup means ‘wolf’s fart.’

I went looking afterward and learned that its official name is vesse-de-loup géante, which is somehow worse, because a vesse is specifically the silent kind. A giant, silent wolf fart. Yum.

We had only recently arrived from the faraway land of Los Angeles, where mushrooms are not exactly springing up out of the sidewalks, so we were skeptical. After a LOT of careful research on identifying it and making sure it was safe (it's a giant puffball, and it's only edible when it's young and pure white all the way through), Sean cooked it up. It was actually quite good! The kids don’t really like eating it, because they don’t really like eating any mushroom, but they love the name.

(Please don’t take any of this as mushroom advice, as I am not a mycologist. I’m a mere baby gardener).

What we know now is that we could have just taken it to the pharmacy. Yes, the pharmacy. In France, pharmacists study mushroom identification as part of their training, and plenty of them, especially out in the countryside, will look through your foraged basket and tell you what’s safe to eat. Not every pharmacist is a mushroom expert, but the ones who aren’t sure will tell you not to eat it, which is also an answer.

So next time, that’s exactly where our mushroom is going. Maybe we’ll pick up some cough drops while we’re there.

7. The oysters come back

Sean loves oysters. Every so often he comes home from the local market with a bag of them and a few lemons, please as can be.

Recently, a neighbor gave as the oyster dos-and-don’ts breakdown. In France, you’re only supposed to eat oysters in months with the letter r in them. September through April, yes. May, June and July, absolutely not. (August also has no r, which the neighbor didn’t bother to mention, presumably because nobody in France is home in August anyway.)

The logic is that summer is spawning season, when oysters go laiteuses, milky, which sounds exactly as appealing in French as it does in English. And before refrigeration, warm weather plus shellfish was a reliable way to lose a week of your life. Researchers have even found ancient shell piles on an island off the coast of Georgia, of all places, showing that people were already skipping summer oysters around 4,000 years ago. So the rule is older than France, and it reached us via a neighbor, which I suppose feels like the correct chain of custody.

Modern oyster farming has mostly solved the problem, but the rule doesn’t care. September arrives, the r comes back, and so do the oysters, building steadily toward Christmas, when oysters are on practically every French holiday table. France eats something like 70,000 tonnes of them over the holidays alone (which means also a staggering number of lemon wedges).

8. Everything starts to simmer

Fall is the season of plats longuement mijotés, all of the long, slow-cooked French dishes: pot-au-feu, blanquette, daube and, of course, bœuf bourguignon. The soups come back, and every kitchen smells like someone has been cooking for six hours.

In our first year here, Sean made bœuf bourguignon for the first time, and we were completely taken with it. It was so delicious. The second time he made it, we invited French friends over for dinner, and when they arrived Sean was still in the kitchen, cooking. The husband came in with a glass of red, sipped it, and stood there observing.

Sean started chopping celery.

“You’re putting celery in it?” he asked.

Sean said yes.

Our friend put his hand on Sean’s shoulder. “Next time,” he said, “we will make it together.”

It still makes us laugh. Apparently, the French have very strict views about how a bœuf bourguignon should be made, and an adapted version is not something they get excited about. We received the note.

9. The raclette

We had never heard of raclette before we moved to France.

In our first fall, our new French friends invited us over for a raclette lunch. We said yes with total confidence and absolutely no idea what it was. Well, we went, and man, it was delicious.

So, for anyone in the position we were in: raclette is a cheese, and also the meal you make with it. It comes from the Alps, Switzerland and the Savoie, where the original method was to hold half a wheel of cheese up to a fire and scrape off the melted layer (racler means to scrape). At home, almost everyone uses a tabletop raclette set, a small electric grill that plugs in, with a stack of tiny nonstick pans, called coupelles, that slide in underneath. Everyone puts a slice of cheese in their own little pan, slides it under the heat, waits for it to bubble, and then pours it over whatever’s on their plate: boiled potatoes in their skins, usually, plus charcuterie, cornichons, little pickled onions, bread, vegetables, whatever you like, really.

You can get all different kinds of raclette cheese. Our favorites are the poivre (with cracked pepper), and the fumée (which is smoked).

It was such a delightful experience, and we soon learned that raclette is a very strong tradition here. Now it’s one of our surest signs of the season: you know it’s fall when raclette cheese starts showing up in the stores and markets. Our organic store even sells a raclette pizza, which our kids consider the best pizza that has ever existed, anywhere.

For our first Christmas in France, we exchanged gifts with our landlord at the farmhouse. Her gift to us was a raclette set. It’s honestly one of the best gifts we’ve ever received, and it comes out every single fall. Last Christmas, our first at the château, we served raclette to our family, and it was a big hit. It’s hard to go wrong with a meal centered around delicious melted cheese.

Every spring, the raclette pizza disappears from the organic store, and it's always a sad day in our house. Spring in France has its own small signs too. The first is a cheese section, sans raclette.

À bientôt,
Kamille

If this was your kind of autumn, follow along. My essays about life in France are free, always, and land in your inbox twice a month.

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And if you’d like the inside of the château, too (the renovation itself, room by room and reveal by reveal), that lives in my Castle Diaries posts, for Supporting Members.

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P.S. If you'd like to see the fog, the falling leaves and even the melted cheese in motion, we film our life at the château on YouTube. You’re very welcome to come along: https://www.youtube.com/@OnceUponaCastle

I know this because I’m one of those people who writes about it. I have personally published articles about bluebells and four-course school lunches and a man who refills your wine glass without you ever catching him doing it, and every one of those things was true, but there are other parts of living in France that aren’t always ‘on the brochure,’ so to speak.

I can see how an article on ‘11 people who shouldn’t move to France’ can come across as a warning, but this isn’t really one. If it were a warning, I’d have to explain what I’m still doing here, three years in, typing this from a small, 17th-century château with a chapel in the woods behind it. These are tradeoffs to be sure, and every one of them is a thing I either accepted, adjusted to, or am still occasionally (or not so occasionally) annoyed by. The question isn’t whether they’re real (oh, they’re real), but rather, whether they’re yours.

Most of those who already love France will likely read this and check every item off with a confident “That’s not me!” and feel tremendously reassured. That’s probably the most likely outcome, which is lovely. But perhaps a few of these will help tip the balance if you’re deciding between France and somewhere else, or help you avoid a real shock once you arrive, if you’ve already made up your mind.

If you’re new here, I’m Kamille. Three years ago we left California for rural France with two kids and considerably more optimism than French. We’re now restoring a small château, and Once Upon a Castle is where I write it down as it happens, including the parts that don’t make it onto the brochure. Come stay a while.

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First, what’s not on the list

You don’t have to like wine. I barely drink. I have sat at long French tables for the past three years nursing the same glass like it’s a prop (which it mostly is), and nobody has ever made it weird. (There’s a whole etiquette about not pouring your own, which I found out the hard way, but that’s in a different post.) If you don’t drink at all, you will be handed sparkling water and an excellent piece of cheese and nobody will investigate.

You don’t have to be fluent. Our French is not fluent, and we’re still okay, and still here.

You don’t have to be rich. People assume a number. The number they assume is wrong in both directions. We're two musicians, and we bought a château. Draw your own conclusions.

You don't have to have French ancestry. Or an EU passport, or a grandmother from Lyon, or any prior connection to this country whatsoever. There's no heritage test. There's a visa, and there's an income question, and both of those are manageable.

So now, here’s the list.

1. You hate paperwork

Not “find paperwork annoying.” Everyone finds paperwork annoying. I mean you have an actual physiological response to administrative friction, the kind where a form with a broken upload field can take your whole afternoon and possibly your sanity with it.

Because here is the thing about French bureaucracy that took me two years to understand: it is not disorganized. It is extremely organized, in a system that was designed by people who are no longer alive, and which has been added to but never subtracted from. Every rule has a reason, and the reason is from 1953.

You will be asked to prove you exist, after which you will provide the proof of your existence, and you will then learn that the proof has an expiration date you did not know it had. You will then be asked for the same information three times by three offices that cannot see each other’s files, and all three will be mildly surprised you found this inconvenient.

It is also getting more expensive and more demanding, not less. Validating a long-stay visa after you arrive now costs €300. It was €200 until May 1st, 2026.1 And as of January 2026, getting your first multi-year residence card now requires a certified A2 French level plus a passing grade on a new civic exam, which is 40 multiple-choice questions, 45 minutes long, and you need to get 32 of them right.2

I’m not saying this to scare you. Those are, after all, reasonable things for a country to ask. I’m saying it because there are quite possibly a lot of people planning around a version of France that stopped existing in January, and I’d rather you plan around this one.

If your reaction to that paragraph was “fine, I’ll make a folder,” you’re fine.

If your reaction was a small hot feeling behind your eyes, you should take that seriously. I’ve written about how this stuff rewires you, and it does (eventually).

2. You need things to happen when someone said they would happen

A date, here, is not a commitment. A date is a general indication of time.

You will be given a Tuesday. The Tuesday will pass. Several Tuesdays will pass. You will send a polite email, then a less polite email, then you will make peace with it and move on emotionally (or not), and that is the moment a van appears in your driveway with no warning whatsoever. The scheduling logic here has its own internal sense and I’ve come around(ish) to a lot of it.

But I want to be honest about the cost, which is that you cannot run a tight operation on top of this. You cannot have a hard deadline that depends on another person showing up. If your work or your temperament requires other people’s reliability, you will spend a year in a low-grade rage and it will not make anyone come faster.

3. Your life is built on convenience

Let’s be specific, because “convenience” is quite vague.

In France, there is no Costco, no Target, no Amazon same-day delivery (at least not in the countryside). No Whole Foods where the thing you need is always in stock and there are 11 versions of it. No avocados in February that are ripe and good and ready for Taco Tuesday.

On Sundays, most things are closed. Some places close on Mondays too (just to keep you humble). Lunch closes the town for about two hours. In August, a meaningful percentage of the country is simply elsewhere.

And if a real part of your financial life runs through your airline miles card and the points ecosystem and the cashback stack, be aware that you are leaving the country that invented that game and entering one that doesn’t really play it. French bank cards are mostly debit, or débit différé, which charges everything to your account in one monthly batch and is the closest thing most people here have to a credit card. Rewards cards barely exist. Nobody is offering you 75,000 bonus points to open an account. Your US cards still work fine (just watch out for those foreign transaction fees!), but the everyday-spend earning you’ve carefully built a travel budget around mostly stops, so plan accordingly.

4. You’re vegan

It’s not that France can’t feed you. Bigger cities are just fine. There are far more vegan restaurants in Paris and Lyon and Nantes than there were five years ago, produce here is outstanding, and the markets will keep you extremely happy.

It’s more so the everyday texture that wears on people. Butter is in things. Just, magically injected into the fibers of the French food supply. Lardons are in things that have no business containing lardons. Cheese is an entire course here, and declining the course is declining a small social ritual that’s happening around you several times a week. Rural restaurant menus can sometimes have absolutely nothing for you (unless you try to be clever and order the croque monsieur without cheese, which is essentially just toast, but they’ll bring you the dang toast and it will have butter on it, and they’ll look shocked when you tell them that butter is also dairy and not something a vegan can eat). Dinner at a neighbor’s house becomes a logistics conversation every single time, and you will be the person having it, possibly forever.

And if you have vegan kids, look hard at the school canteen, because opting out isn’t really the culture. Lunch at school is a four-course sit-down meal and it’s one of the best things about French childhood. A child who can’t eat most of it is having a different experience of the day than the kid next to them.

None of that is a no. Vegans do live here and thrive. But it’s a daily tax rather than an occasional one, and you’d be wise to ‘price it in.’

5. You like large portions

The food is better, and there is also less of it.

You will either find this a relief or you will find yourself, at 4pm, standing in front of an open fridge that is full of excellent things, in a country that does not believe in snacking, wondering what happened to you (like me).

6. You can’t live with old things

Old houses are not neutral. They have sloping floors and doors that only shut if you lift them slightly at the same angle every time and light switches that do nothing, ever, and hazardous wobbly staircases. In February a stone house smells like a stone house. Most windows are single-pane and beautiful and they lose heat like an open mouth.

There’s a real personality split here that I don’t think people examine before they move. Some people look at an old surface or an old creaking door and see the life in it, the history behind it. Some people look at the same creaking door and feel a low, persistent itch to replace it. Neither one is wrong, but one of them is going to have a much better time in a country where “we repainted the shutters fifteen years ago” counts as recent.

If your baseline for a nice home is new, France is going to read as slightly run-down to you for at least a year. Some people’s eyes adjust, and some people’s never do.

7. You require central heating and air conditioning

This past summer was, according to Météo-France, the hottest the country has recorded since they started keeping track in 1900. Three and a half degrees above average, three separate heatwaves adding up to 53 days, and 104°F (40°C) was crossed 178 times (against 88 in the whole of 2003).

And the shops here just ran out of air conditioning units. Not just "hard to find." Sold out. And people became desperate. On the second of July, Lidl put fans and portable air conditioners on sale across the country, and hundreds of people lined up outside a store in Nanterre from before dawn. When the doors opened at 8am, the crowd forced them off their hinges and rushed the aisles to fight over the ten or so air conditioners actually in stock. Shoving, fists, police inside the store restoring order. The same thing happened at Lidls all over France that day. Grown humans. Literally fighting over air conditioning units. In France.

Even after all of that, only about a quarter of French homes have air conditioning.3 The demand is overwhelming and the installed base has barely moved, which means that if you’re picturing arriving in the countryside and buying a unit in July, you are picturing a queue.

Heating is its own thing. Rural old houses usually do have heating, just not the kind Americans picture. Only about a third of rural communes are even on the gas network (against more than 90% of urban ones), so out here it’s wood and oil and heat pumps, and an old house with proper insulation and a modern system is a rare find rather than a default. Our own heater has been misbehaving since the day we moved in and the radiator knobs are broken, which means we can’t shut off rooms we don’t use, which means we are heating seven bedrooms for four people when we have it on. Highly inefficient, and a heavy weight on our fuel bill.

If you have a medical reason to need reliable climate control, this is not really a charm point. When you search for housing here, you’ll want to ask about the heating system before you fall in love with the spiral staircase.

8. Your driver’s license is from the wrong state

This one surprised me, so I want to give you fair warning.

A US license is good for one year after you become a resident here. After that you have to exchange it, and you can only exchange it if your state has a reciprocity agreement with France. Eighteen states currently do.4 Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin. The list gets reissued and it changes, so check the current one rather than trusting a blog (including this one).

If your state (like ours) isn’t on it, there’s no workaround. You just have to go through the French license process from the beginning. The theory exam, which is a truly difficult test that French teenagers fail all the time, then the practical exam, through a driving school. The average cost is about €1,800 nationally, more in Paris. Yeah, not cheap.

Three left, and they’re the ones that might actually decide it.

If you want more like this, free subscribers get two essays a month about what living here is really like, written from inside it.

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9. You need to be good at things in public

For at least a year after you move here, you will be a slightly stupid version of yourself. Not actually stupid, but you’ll just have no way to demonstrate otherwise. You’ll be the adult at the table whose contribution to a fast, funny conversation is a delayed nod. You’ll be the parent who didn’t understand the school email and finds out on the day. You’ll hand over a sentence you rehearsed in the car and watch it land completely wrong because you pronounced an é as a regular e in one of the words and now they have no idea what you’re saying.

There’s a version of this that people underestimate because they’ve only ever experienced the vacation version, where being foreign is slightly charming and everyone finds your accent fun or delightful. But living here is different. The charm does have a shelf life (roughly the length of a holiday). After that you’re just a person who’s hard to talk to.

It goes in the same box as this: French people are warm, and they are not performatively warm. Nobody is going to over-function to make you feel comfortable. If your baseline sense of being okay in the world is topped up by several small pleasant interactions with strangers each day, that tap can get turned way down.

The people who do well here are the ones who can be bad at something in front of other people without it costing too much internally. People who can put themselves out there and also make the effort to make friends even when it’s not easy. You have to learn to be okay with making a fool of yourself over and over again. Not easy, but honestly a useful skill to develop. Start practicing now. Charades, in front of strangers, about a plumbing problem.

10. Your income doesn’t travel, and there’s no plan B

Here’s where I’m going to be blunt, because this is the one that actually ends the dream for most people and the internet is weirdly hushed about it.

The long-stay visitor visa, the one most Americans arrive on, requires you to sign a handwritten statement that you will not work in France. That’s not a formality. You also have to show/prove resources, currently a minimum of about €1,478 of income per month per person, and private health insurance.5

The good news (and this is genuinely new), is that in June 2026 the Interior Ministry answered a parliamentary question about remote work and said that a foreign national working from France for a company established abroad, paid and taxed abroad, doing nothing connected to France, should be considered non-active for the purposes of French law.6 That’s the clearest thing anyone in government has said on this in years, and it legitimizes a situation a great many people were already in and nervous about.

Though there are two honest caveats. A ministerial reply is an interpretation, not a law. And it’s written around a foreign employer, which is not obviously the same as freelancing for a scatter of US clients. (To any freelancers out there: get actual advice from an actual immigration lawyer rather than from a politically heated Facebook group or from me.)

If you need to earn money here, there are proper routes. The old “passeport talent” was restructured into the carte de séjour “talent” under the January 2024 immigration law, which suits high earners, founders, researchers and artists. There’s an entrepreneur and profession libérale route for freelancers, which requires a viable project and resources/income of around €1,867 a month. There’s also the standard salaried route if a French employer sponsors you.

But the underlying thing is simpler than any of that. If your career is location-locked to the United States, if it requires a US license or a US room or a US network that doesn’t work at a 6 or 9-hour time difference, and you don’t have another way to make money, then this is not really a visa problem, but an arithmetic problem, and moving will not solve it.

And I’d add a smaller, related one: if your goal is to make a boatload of money, France is a strange choice. Not impossible, but structurally not optimized for it, in a culture that doesn’t organize identity around work and taxes accordingly. If maximizing income is the point, there are better places, and I say that with affection for this one.

11. You’re moving to ‘fix everything’

If there’s a single sentence you’d finish with “and once we’re in France, everything will be better,” it’s worth looking at very hard.

Because while there are several significant quality-of-life items that improve upon arrival in France (pace, rest, food, work-life balance, affordability), there are other things that don’t improve, and those are the ones you’re bringing with you. Your problems are portable, and they travel extremely well, and they arrive fully unpacked before your shipping container does. A marriage that’s struggling does not get easier when you remove both people’s friends, language, and competence in the same month. It gets harder. Everything gets stress-tested, all at once, in the same season.

Moving abroad is an amplifier. If the underlying thing is good, it gets louder and even better. If it’s fragile, you will find out fast.

My advice is to make any major repairs before you get here, so you’re not relying on France to fix everything, and then feel ultimately let down when it doesn’t.

The reality

None of these are verdicts, and they don’t even weigh the same. Number five is kind of a joke, and number ten just is or isn’t.

You can be three of these things and be just fine, because the upside is truly high enough to absorb a lot of friction, as long as you know which friction you signed up for. I think what breaks people isn’t the tradeoff necessarily. It’s discovering the tradeoff in month four while your kid is crying about school and a man is supposed to come fix your heater and hasn’t come for 11 days.

I say three things because that’s us.

There’s a version of this essay where the writer lists 11 disqualifiers and then reveals she was absolutely zero of them, and has been suited for a migration to France since the day she was born. But that version is useless to you (and also I’d have to make it all up).

Here’s where we’re at.

#1 - paperwork. Still hate it. Three years in, I have not achieved serenity. What I’ve achieved is a system, which is that I do the next single step and refuse to look at the whole staircase. One document, one appointment, one upload. When I look at the entire process at once, I lose perspective (and the whole day), so I’ve stopped looking at the entire process at once. That’s a coping mechanism, not enlightenment, and it works.

#2 - timelines. We still get surprised. You’d think we’d have learned by now! Contractors disappear for weeks, or a project that was going to happen in June happens in a different June. I’ve written about this before like someone who has made peace with it, but honestly I’ve made peace with it maybe seventy percent. The other thirty percent is me standing pitifully at a window at 9:15am on a day someone said they were coming.

#3 - convenience. We do miss Target, Costco, same-day shipping. But there’s another beautiful side to this coin. We don’t get avocados in February, and what we get instead is a food system that runs on seasons. The strawberries arrive in early summer and for about three weeks you eat an unreasonable number of them (and they’re incredible) and then they’re gone until next year, which turns out to be a much better arrangement than a mediocre version being available at all times. You get excited about produce, like you do about the seaons themselves. And the lack of Costco and Target has done something I didn’t anticipate, which is to say that it forces you to consume less overall, and to be pickier about what you buy. You become a more curated shopper. Quality over quantity, which is a foundational French philosophy.

And the language, which isn’t on the list but should probably count. Sean and I are not fluent. There’s a general fantasy that you simply absorb a language after living somewhere for a couple of years, and that is not what happens to adults who have two children and work from home. Yes, we’re working on it, and we fully intend to get there. But three years in, we are two people who still understand considerably more than we can say, and still depend heavily on our charades and miming skills to communicate properly. Our kids, meanwhile, are little language wizards. Ah, to be young and spongey.

So, yes. We failed a good third of my own list, and we’re still here, and we’re not leaving. Good news for anyone who felt discouraged somewhere around number six.

And just a reminder that the list isn’t a screening test. It’s more of a bill that you want to be sure to read before signing.

The next part is what I'd normally save for paid subscribers. I'm leaving it open because I think it's the most useful thing in this essay.

The money

When we left, Sean had spent 17 years teaching music in Southern California classrooms. That was his career. It was not a job he was doing while waiting for something else, it was the thing, and it was also a pretty location-locked profession. A public school music teacher in California who is only fluent in English is not a role that travels well to rural France. Paris, maybe, but not the countryside life we had landed on.

So he left it.

Not “took a sabbatical.” He fully pivoted into ed-tech, freelance, remote, working with US clients from a house in rural France, in an industry he had adjacent knowledge of and no track record in or resume for.

We were optimistic and thought that with enough LinkedIn poking and prodding, Sean would have a new steady income in no time. Well, it didn’t go as planned.

Part of the delay was our excitement when first arriving, reveling in our newfound space and beauty and lifestyle. We were really soaking it in, living off some savings, and not prioritizing the job hunt as much as we could have. After a few months we realized we needed to get serious and start earning. So it became a LinkedIn grind, with daily networking Zoom calls, resume tweaks, research, and more tedious job-hunting ick.

It was actually very stressful, and if we could go back and do this all again, we would have started the job hunt WAY before the actual move and tried to secure something before arriving. That would have eliminated a lot of headache.

Eventually, after about six months, Sean started to pick up more and more freelance work, securing our income. But it came with sacrifices. All of the companies were US-based, either 6 or 9 hours behind us, which meant phone and video meetings during dinner or just after, and sometimes staying up very late to work at the same time as the US team. And there was the salary dip. Sean had worked up to a great salary in Southern California over 17 years, and we had to adjust to a different income level. This would have been much harder had it not been that living in France accommodates for lower salaries. But still, it was an adjustment.

Sean has thinned out his freelance work since we moved into the château and we’re now focusing more on this Substack, our YouTube channel, and music. A freelance lifestyle has many upsides (flexibility, more time at home and with your family), but you do sacrifice the security that comes with a steady paycheck.

There’s a stretch in the beginning where you’ve made the leap, and the leap is done, and you’re standing in the new place with the old income gone and the new income not yet arrived, and there is nothing to do but the work. Not a lot of people write about this part because it doesn’t photograph very well and it’s not exactly fun to talk about. There’s no picture of a man at a kitchen table at 9pm zoomity-zoomin with a team of people on the west coast of California (well, maybe one 😉).

Here’s some advice based on our first year:

The gap is longer than your spreadsheet says. Everyone’s spreadsheet assumes the new income starts in month three. Ours took six plus. Build the version where it starts much later and see if you can still live in it. If you can’t, you might not be ready yet. You might be in eight months.

Two incomes that both stopped is a different risk than one. We did not have the version of this where one partner keeps a stable salary while the other experiments. If you do have that version, you have a luxury and it will make things much easier.

Your costs drop, but not on your schedule. Yes, life here is cheaper in meaningful ways, and we no longer pay California rent or California preschool or California anything. But the savings arrive gradually and the setup costs arrive immediately, all at once, in your first six months, in a currency you’re still doing mental math on.

The career change was the actual leap. Not the country. Moving countries is logistics, and logistics are solvable. Sean rebuilding a professional identity from scratch at the same time as learning a language, a bureaucracy, and a village was the hard part, and it was hard in a way that had nothing to do with France specifically.

The first year, honestly

The hardest part starts somewhere around month four, when the adrenaline is gone and the novelty is gone. Not everything is harder, but a phone call is harder, a doctor’s appointment is harder, buying the right kind of cream is harder. Small friction, applied to every single task, all day, for months.

And in your own country you know if a week was normal or bad. Here, you have no baseline. Is this hard because moving abroad is hard, or because we’ve made a mistake, or because it’s February? You really can’t tell in the beginning. This gets to a lot of people, and it’s why so many leave in year one and then say afterward that they wish they’d waited.

The other thing: our kids went into full immersion with no French. That was its own arc, and a rough one, and I’ve written about it in full. But the compressed version for anyone planning this is that the children’s adjustment is not a footnote in your adjustment. It’s a second, simultaneous adjustment, it runs on its own timeline, and it will take priority over yours when it needs to.

The eight questions

If you came to me seriously with a dream to move to France, these are the questions I would ask you:

1. If your income stopped tomorrow, how many months could you live here before something breaks? Not “how long could we stretch it.” How long before you’d have to make a decision you’d resent. If the number is under twelve, you might not be ready. Prepare that income padding.

2. What is your second way to make money, and have you ever actually done it? Not “I could probably freelance.” Have you invoiced someone? Have you been paid? A plan B you’ve never tested is risky. Start testing it before you arrive.

3. Is your driver’s license from one of the eighteen states? Check today, before anything else, because it’s a two-minute answer with a €1,800 consequence.

4. Which one of you wants this more? There’s always one. That’s fine and normal. The question is how much more, and whether the other person is genuinely choosing it or going along with it. Being on the same page will help tremendously with overcoming challenges along the way.

5. What’s the sentence you’d finish with “and once we’re in France, that will be better”? Say it out loud. If the thing in that sentence lives inside a person rather than inside a country, you may have found the hazard. Manage your expectations of what France can actually ‘fix.’

6. Who at home needs you, and what’s your actual plan for the emergency? Work out the honest flight time and cost from your nearest airport, and then sit with how you’d feel getting a family emergency phone call. Most people do this math after they move. I would suggest doing it before.

7. How do you behave when you’re incompetent in front of strangers? You already know. Think of the last time you were badly out of your depth publicly. Whatever you did then, you’ll do here, several times a week, for a year. Try to get some practice in, and have fun with it!

8. Can you name three things you’d be giving up that you actually love? If you can’t, you haven’t thought about it properly, and you’re going to be ambushed by one of them in month six. People who can name them do much better, because the loss arrives as something expected rather than as evidence the decision was wrong.

If you answer those and still want to come, then you should definitely come. And you will probably truly love it here.

We’re three years in and we’re not fluent and we’re still annoyed by the paperwork and a man is supposed to come look at our heater and I don’t know when he’s coming.

But I’d do it again tomorrow and all the days after.

À bientôt,
Kamille

If you’re new here and this was useful, come stay a while. Free subscribers get two essays a month about life in rural France, the culture, the mistakes, and the parts that don’t make it onto the brochure.

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Paid subscribers also get Castle Diaries, where I document the château restoration in real time. The decisions, the costs, and the things that go wrong.

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P.S. If you recognized yourself in a few of these, welcome. I recognized myself in three, and we moved anyway. We film our life at the château on YouTube, the beautiful parts and the parts that require a plumber, if you'd like to see how that's going: https://www.youtube.com/@OnceUponaCastle

And tell me in the comments: which number was yours? Or better, tell me the one I left off. I’ve been doing this three years and I’m sure I’ve missed something 😊

Then we got to the part about the mortgage, and "thirty minutes" became something we'd believe in the way children believe in the tooth fairy.

By the time we stopped talking, we’d cov…

Read more

For months, we’ve been keeping a secret.

While you’ve been reading these letters, we’ve also been carrying cameras everywhere we go.

Every muddy boot, every impossible renovation, every chicken-related emergency, every dinner around the table, every tiny victory that has somehow made all the difficult parts worthwhile.

And amongst all the dreams and chaos, we’ve been filming it all.

It felt wrong to keep such a big part of our lives from the people who have been reading this story all along, so I’m especially happy to finally share it with you here!

If you have been reading this publication for a while, you already know about the château. You know how long we searched for it, how unlikely the whole thing felt, and how strange it was to finally walk through the doors of a place we had spent years dreaming about.

For the past few months, our computers have been groaning and perspiring beneath the weight of approximately 9 million video clips: château tours, moving boxes, muddy children, cranky chickens, building projects, family dinners, and Sean attempting jobs for which neither of us possesses any formal qualifications.

And now, finally, we can show you what we’ve been making.

Once Upon a Castle is officially a YouTube series. Squeee!!

It follows our family as we restore this 17th-century château in the French countryside and slowly make it our home. You’ll see us restore rooms, plant gardens, make spectacular mistakes, celebrate small victories, raise two children in rural France, make music in old stone rooms, and slowly learn what it means to care for a place that has been standing for centuries.

The first episode starts at the very beginning of our journey: moving into the château.

If you’re new here, welcome. My husband Sean and I moved our family from Southern California to rural France, where we’re restoring a 17th-century château one room (and one story) at a time. This publication is where I write the chapters that don’t fit anywhere else: life in France, the history behind what we’re restoring, the comedy of learning a new culture, and the smaller moments that are often my favorite part of the adventure. If that sounds like your sort of story, I’d love to have you along.

Subscribe now

Chapter One: Moving Into the Château

We had imagined this day for years. In those imaginings, the weather was lovely, everyone was healthy, the boxes were neatly labeled, and we moved serenely into the château while charming French music played somewhere in the distance and we sipped a glass of wine.

In reality, it rained. The power went out. Sean and I were both very sick, there were more boxes than any family could reasonably explain (the amount that makes you feel self-conscious once the movers arrive), and we had to navigate how to get some extremely tricky pieces into a property that wasn’t exactly made for oversized armoires and little fragile greenhouses.

So yes - there were chickens to relocate, enormous pieces of furniture to maneuver and a château that was not especially concerned with being ready for us. It was chaotic, exhausting and not remotely how we had pictured it.

But by the end of it, we were home.

Start With Episode One

And because we have taken an unconventionally long time to announce our own YouTube channel (well, a week), you don’t even have to wait for Episode Two.

Chapter Two: Our First Christmas at the Château

Five family members were coming for Christmas, which meant we had only a handful of days to hang the decorations, assemble the furniture, disguise a bathroom we were emphatically not ready to renovate, and install a shamefully large American-sized refrigerator.

Then, on Christmas morning, we woke up to snow.

Watch Our First Christmas at the Château

This new series does not mean that the letters are going away. This will still be the place where I can tell the parts of the story that need more room, such as the history behind what you see, the decisions we are making, the things that go wrong off camera, the ongoing awe and comedy of being Americans in France, and the more personal reflections that do not always belong in a video.

The videos will let you come along with us, whereas these letters will let us sit down afterward and talk about what really happened. All the goss.

If you enjoy the first two episodes, the most helpful thing you can do is watch them, subscribe to the channel, and leave us a comment. YouTube is a mysterious little kingdom ruled by algorithms, and those early signals help it understand that real human beings might actually want to see what happens next.

If you do leave a comment on the videos, tell us that you came from Substack, tell us what made you laugh, or simply introduce yourself. It is truly strange and wonderful to imagine people who have been reading these stories for over a year now stepping through the doors and seeing them come to life.

We have so much to show you!

I have a feeling this is going to be one of the great adventures of our lives.

With love from the château,
Kamille & Sean

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Once Upon a Castle is the story of our American family restoring a centuries-old château in rural France, one room (and one chapter) at a time. If you’d like to follow the adventure, I’d love to send the next letter straight to your inbox.

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Last year, we almost didn’t get our château because of the month of August.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The bank wasn’t about to reject our mortgage simply because someone wanted a month at the beach. But when you’re an American trying to buy a centuries-old château in rural France, and every day feels like another chance for something to fall apart, it certainly felt that way at the time.

We submitted our mortgage application in July, feeling optimistic and confident. When we’d bought a house before (in the U.S.), the process had gone smoothly, without any major hiccups. We knew there would be paperwork, a few phone calls, maybe a delay or two, and then finally, the answer.

Instead, August arrived.

Our mortgage broker disappeared, as did the realtor and the sellers. Every person at the bank who had ever replied to an email seemed to disappear. The local bakery closed. The little boutique down the street closed. Handwritten signs began appearing in shop windows announcing that everyone would be back in September.

Our mortgage application wasn’t denied, but it was significantly delayed. I pictured it sitting in a folder somewhere, wearing sunglasses, happily shelved and getting some much-needed R&R.

At first, I found the whole thing maddening. Americans are taught that momentum is everything. That if something stops moving, you push harder. You send another email, you leave another voicemail, you send another text message. You “circle back” and “follow up.” We have an entire vocabulary dedicated to refusing to let anything sit still.

France, meanwhile, looked at my increasingly frantic follow-up emails and simply continued sending me those polite automated replies saying “We’ll see you in September.”

The French have a word that doesn’t translate neatly into English: la rentrée. You’ll often hear it translated loosely as “back to school,” but that barely scratches the surface. School is certainly part of it, but so is work. Parliament resumes, concert seasons begin, new books are released, builders return, cafés buzz again. It’s less “the end of summer” than the reopening of an entire country.

The closest comparison I can think of is New Year’s Day. Except, instead of making ambitious resolutions after a late night in December, France does it after a month of sunshine, long lunches, family gatherings, and actual rest.

The first time I really noticed la rentrée wasn’t because someone had explained it to me. It was because we walked into E.Leclerc (a major French supermarket chain) to buy school supplies for our kids, and the place looked like Christmas for office supplies.

Entire aisles had transformed into monuments to BIC, Maped, and Pelikan. Colored pencils in packs of twelve, eighteen, twenty-four. Felt tips, highlighters, chalk. Parents stood in little clusters comparing lists (which are long). Children examined pencil cases with the seriousness of architects selecting materials for a cathedral.

In France, schools don’t simply ask for “school supplies.” They issue what reads like a diplomatic agreement, and ours ran to a full page:

• One erasable blue pen, Frixion type

• Ballpoints in green, red, and black (no four-color pen)

• One sharpener, simple, with a reservoir

• One box of white chalk

• One black ardoise, the small slate you’d assume went out with the Third Republic, and one cloth to clean it

• One 30cm ruler, rigid. Not metal, and not plastic that bends

• One A4 display folder, forty sleeves maximum

• One compass and one set square

• One dictionary: Robert Junior, ages 8 to 11. Not the pocket edition

The four-color pen (crayon 4 couleurs) is arguably one of the most beloved objects in French stationery, and it has been specifically, individually barred. I have no idea what happened in France’s educational history to justify such a consistently firm stance against four-color pens, but somewhere there’s a first-grade teacher with stories.

There’s also a note about the snack box - fruit, compote, and dried fruit will be accepted in the morning. Nothing else is listed, because nothing else is up for discussion.

And then, at the bottom, under its own heading: pour la classe du dehors (for the outdoor class). A small backpack, a pair of boots, a cap, and clothing appropriate to the weather. Yes, the kids have outside class here, rain or shine. It’s wonderful.

Lastly, you’re required to write your child’s name on every single item. Every glue stick, every folder, and every single pen and colored pencil - all 50 or so of them.

The lists made me laugh (and cry a little, because it’s a lot to translate and not everything is a direct or simple translation), but they also made me realize something I’d been missing, which was that this shopping was to be experienced as a celebrated ritual rather than just another trip to the store.

Every family in the store was preparing for the same beginning, and everyone was participating in the same collective reset. And it wasn’t rushed or chaotic. It felt…ceremonial.

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Back home in the U.S., September often felt like the continuation of a race that had never really stopped. Summer ended, schedules exploded, and everyone lurched into fall already tired.

But here, September feels different. People return from August with stories instead of burnout. The conversations are about where everyone went, what they cooked, who they saw, how tan the kids got, whether the tomatoes did well this year (those are literally the things we talked about when catching up with the parents on the kids’ first day back to school last week).

There’s an energy to it that I don’t think I fully appreciated until we’d lived here long enough to experience both sides of it. August is considered part of real life, and it isn’t treated like an interruption, which changes what comes after it.

This week our coffee table and buffets disappeared beneath stacks of notebooks, fresh pencils, little glue sticks, and rulers that were, thankfully, rigid enough to satisfy the French educational system. We carefully packed everything into their backpacks before school started, and they were excited in the way only children with brand-new supplies can be.

I wrote their names on all of it, including every pencil and pen. Even on the black ones, where you couldn’t even see the sharpie. Just following the French directions.

Our mortgage was approved in November, by the way. Everybody came back to work in September. It still took until November.

C’est la vie,
Kamille

I’m Kamille, and I write about our family’s life in rural France, where we are slowly repairing a small 17th-century château. Two free posts a month, plus two more and the renovation diary for paid subscribers.

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American parents, what’s on your list this year?

There was one bedroom, four people, and a kitchen with exactly enough counter space to make a small sandwich (provided you committed fully to the sandwich and did not attempt anything else in the same hour). There was no yard or balcony. Not even a sad slab of concrete with a folding chair on it. The view from our window was the roof of the house next door and a petite tangle of power lines.

Now, to be fair, that apartment was a block from the beach, and that is not nothing. When we needed to go outside, we had a beautiful place to be. But the neighborhood was becoming increasingly dangerous, with more theft and break-ins, more violent crime, and taking two very small children out for a stroll started to feel like a chore rather than a pleasure.

Three years ago we left that little apartment, and today we live in a small château in northwest France. I'm aware that "small château" is a ridiculous phrase. It belongs in the same family as "casual black tie" and "a light snack before dinner." But bear with me.

The house is 2,863 square feet. 7 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, 11 acres, one river, one forest, one chapel in the trees.

In American terms, 2,863 square feet is a large suburban house. Likely someone reading this lives in one. The difference is that the large suburban house does not have two turrets on it, or a chapel in the woods, or a coach house that used to hold horse-drawn carriages.

Which is the thing I most want to say clearly before I say anything else: we did not buy more house. We bought more land, more history, and…more problems.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château and documenting it as it happens.

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Now, we did not go straight from the apartment to the castle. There was most definitely a middle step, and I recommend the middle step to everyone considering a similar move.

When we first arrived in France more than three years ago, we rented a farmhouse on the grounds of a very large château. Partly to get to know the country and the region before committing to either, and partly to observe château life from the safe distance of a tenant. This way we could peripherally observe authentic château ownership.

The farmhouse was a 3-bedroom longhouse (about 1,520 ft²), which is roughly three times the apartment we’d just left. We thoroughly enjoyed starfish-ing our way through all the extra space, spreading out and literally skipping down the hall at times. But the square footage inside almost paled in comparison to what was happening outside.

We now had an outside that was not only beautiful, varied, and safe, but also ours, and available to us at any given moment. There was a wall around our garden and inside that wall was a small eden of flowers and little trees, and just past it, a private forest, and past that, a small lake, and past that, the endless paths and fields of the French countryside. The kids could just open the door and go outside whenever they had the urge.

And we leaned in hard to our newly-given outdoor space. We put in a playhouse, a swing set, a trampoline, a chicken coop we filled with seven chickens (gifting us fresh eggs each morning). We also added a vegetable garden (which flourished beyond anything my Los Angeles countertop herbs had prepared me for), plus raspberries and wild blackberries and…the list goes on.

It was glorious. Then, about two years in to our rented famhouse life, we bought a castle. And now that we’re here? We live in about a third of it. Our bedrooms, the kitchen, a bathroom, and the living room are all on the first floor, and the four of us spend roughly 95% of our indoor life there. The other floors exist, yes, and we use them more when we have family visiting. We also have renovation plans for them (in due time). But day to day, we occupy a normal sized house that happens to be wearing a castle around it.

So, with all this space, it should be perfect! And mostly it is wonderful, and there is another side of this coin.

You might reasonably assume that the drawbacks of moving into a castle would be castle-shaped. A ghost, perhaps, or a portrait whose eyes follow you. Something atmospheric.

Here is what we actually got.

Drawback one: you will fill it, and it will not take you long

There’s some law about this, I’m certain of it. Something about if there is space, it will be filled. Give a family a room and they will produce enough belongings to justify the room, at speed.

At one point my husband Sean suggested (in the tone of a man approaching a subject delicately) whether I might have a buffet problem.

Now, I’m not talking about an all-you-can-eat buffet, with delicious waffles and fruit salad. I’m speaking of furniture. At one point, we had no less than seven buffets in our farmhouse.

Before the alarm is raised, I would like to enter two things into my defense. First, most old houses have no closets. None. Storage as a built-in concept simply had not occurred to anyone in the 17th century, and the solution then, as now, was furniture. You want your things somewhere? Buy a piece of furniture to put them in. Armoires, china cabinets, buffets. Second, the prices at our local donation shop were so absurd that walking past a gorgeous old French buffet for 40 euros started to feel less like restraint and more like stupidity.

So yes, we had at one time, seven buffets. I think we have only six now (😬) which I might say is a perfectly reasonable amount of buffets.

It was, to say the least, a different story in Los Angeles. Back in that little apartment, I kept The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo on my nightstand like a devotional text. Once a year I’d reread it and do the full cleanse, holding each object and asking whether it sparked joy (which sounds spiritual and was in fact structural, because we could not physically fit one more thing into that apartment). The size of the apartment gave us the discipline, and Marie Kondo was our divine minimalist guru.

I sometimes miss the limit. Being forced to keep only what was essential was a healthy practice that we’re now not inclined to follow.

I have mentioned Marie Kondo to at least three French people now and not one of them had heard of her. The whole global tidying phenomenon appears to have simply not landed here, and standing in one of these ancient stone houses, you understand why. There is room for everything, including the things that do not spark joy and never did and are currently living in buffet number four.

Drawback two: I cannot locate my husband.

There’s a RAYE song you may have heard called Where Is My Husband! and I would like her to know that it is not, for me, a metaphor. It has been my theme song for the past 9 months.

In the apartment, saying Sean’s name was sufficient. It was not possible for him to not hear me. Every room was the next room. You could be at “the far end of the house” and still be within about eleven feet of another human being.

The process here on the château grounds is different. I go to a west-facing window. “Sean?” Nothing. I try again, adding volume and a question mark that has begun to fray. “SEAN?“ Nothing. I walk to an east-facing window, lean out, call again. Nothing.

Because he could be anywhere! He could be at the gate house feeding the chickens, he could be at the orchard watering the fruit trees, or in the kitchen garden picking tomatoes, or in the coach house taking apart an appliance, or in the forest gathering firewood, or down by the river standing very still and mapping out landscaping we will not do for four years, or in the cave restarting the heater for the fifteenth time that day.

So then I call his phone, which works or doesn’t depending on whether our carrier has decided to participate in French rural life that afternoon.

I’ve heard that men develop selective hearing after enough years of marriage, having learned that their name, called in an increasingly shrill register, is almost always attached to a task they forgot or a task about to be assigned. I’ve considered this theory carefully, and I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I think the man genuinely cannot hear me, which is somehow worse, because it means there’s nothing to be annoyed about, except for how much land we now have.

Once Upon a Castle is where I write about all of this: the château, the countryside, and what it’s like to live in France as an American.

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Drawback three, which turned out to be the best thing we’ve bought

So, to help with our acreage ‘problem,’ we bought walkie talkies, and they have many uses.

Sometimes they’re for calling the kids in for dinner. “Hey kids, à table. Over.” A small voice coming back through the static: “Roger that. We’re coming.” Efficient.

They’re also for when the kids want to go check on the chickens or gather eggs by themselves, and we would like to let them, and we would also like to hear a small voice confirm every few minutes that everything is fine at the coop. We are still, I think, recovering slightly from all those years in a neighborhood where you kept your children within arm’s reach. That reflex has not fully left us (it may never).

They’re also for the forest. We’ll be out walking as a family and the kids will want to take a different path, one that branches off from ours, and instead of saying no, we hand over a walkie-talkie. Off they go down their own trail, and we stay in contact.

And they’re for the coach house. A couple of months ago when Sean and I were preparing the coach house, many days we were over there working from morning to evening, and the kids would rather be back at the château playing, so they go, and the walkie talkie comes with them.

In Los Angeles, the answer to “can I go outside?” was almost always no, and it wasn’t because I’m strict. It was because of where we lived.

Here, not only is it eons safer, but the walkie talkies allow us to spread out across our grounds, take up space, and still communicate freely and without screaming myself hoarse across a field.

Drawback four: heat, and quite a lot of it

There is so much more of this house to heat, and heating it is not optional, because winters here are serious. Our heater has been temperamental since the day we moved in and we go through fuel at a rate that feels downright shameful. Worse, the knobs on the radiators are all broken, which means we cannot shut off the rooms we aren’t using (which is most of them). When the heat is on, it is on for the entire château, every unoccupied room warmly and expensively toasty, the system working itself half to death to keep a guest room comfortable for exactly nobody. A modern heating system sits very near the top of our priority list.

Why we chose a ‘little’ castle

Somewhere along the way, back when we were still in Los Angeles, I read that families in smaller homes tend to be closer, for the unglamorous reason that they grow up physically nearer to each other. At the time I found this enormously comforting. Nobody was closer than us! We were practically one organism with four heads.

That line came back to me constantly while we were looking at properties here, because you can get a lot out here for what would buy you very little in the States, and we saw it. We toured châteaux with more than forty rooms, manor houses with several outbuildings, all of them waiting for someone with loads of money and a decade. And in the moment, standing in the fourth reception room of a building you could actually own, something happens to your brain. All of this. Mine. My own. My precious…

And then I would think about the four of us in 500 square feet, and how much I did not want to lose that closeness, and how strange it would be to buy a 20-room house - a house where we could go a whole afternoon without crossing paths.

So we bought the smallest château we saw. The smallness is a big part of why we fell for it. It’s a little crooked, quite quirky, extremely cozy, and just right, which makes it a genuinely Goldilocks castle. Less Malfoy Manor, more the Weasley Burrow with two little turrets.

There’s still plenty of room for the dreams: our own bedrooms eventually, maybe an office, a music studio, a room for exercise. It is almost too much, but not quite.

For now, though, we’re all still on the first floor. The children don’t have a playroom. They don’t even have their own rooms yet! (which will come, and which will require some renovation and money and patience). But we like keeping the living small. We’re not grand people. It turns out you can live an ungrand life inside a fairly grand building, and nobody stops you.

So, the house solved for closeness, which is what we actually wanted. And the walkie talkies solved for the land. The kids are somewhere out in it right now, which was the dream all along.

It’s a wildly different life. In most of the ways that matter for our family, it’s lovelier than anything we had access to before. And in some very specific ways, it’s harder, and more expensive, and involves considerably more shouting out of windows.

Anyway, it’s nearly 6pm, which means it’s nearly dinner, which means I need to locate one husband and two children across 11 acres.

The children have a walkie-talkie. The husband is unaccounted for.

À bientôt,
Kamille

If this is your first time here: Once Upon a Castle is our family’s real-time record of moving to rural France and restoring a small château. The neighbors, the bluebell forest, the chickens, the renovation, and everything this country keeps teaching us that we didn’t know we needed to learn. Two free essays a month, always.

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New here? I’m Kamille. We left California, moved to rural France, and bought a small château in the countryside. This is Castle Diaries, where I write down all the renovation details, stories, and how often it actually goes wrong.

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This post is about a pool that does not yet exist.

We started planning the pool in January, just weeks after buying the château, which tells you something about our priorities and possibly about us as people.

The first pool company came out, walked the property, listened carefully while we explained where we wanted it and how big, and then sent a proposal for a pool in a completely different place, in a different size. Not in any way adjacent to what we’d discussed. So we wrote back with a few small corrections and asked whether we might meet again.

Alas, we never heard from him. Not that week, not any week. Not ever.

Moving on!

So we asked around and found another pool company. We met, talked, brainstormed, and eventually their proposal arrived, and we signed the paperwork that bound all of us together on this project, like a marriage. And like most marriages, the real work began after the union.

We told the pool guy (we’ll call him François) exactly what our goal was, which was for our children to be swimming by the summer. We painted the whole picture, and also told him we were prepping the coach house as a summer rental and it would be wonderful to have the pool ready for guests. He said no problem! He would have it done by July.

Then a legitimate schedule arrived, with the work broken out week by week, every phase laid out in order, ending on a completion date of July 21st. We were over the moon to have an actual schedule like this, which felt like an anomaly among the typical French workflow we had experienced so far.

The first work week came and the team showed up on time, with bells on, and demolished the old unusable pool with tremendous efficiency and speed. It was gone within a few days, and we stood there watching, thinking, “Well, look at this. Look at us. We’ve finally got it all figured out.”

The funny thing is, back in May, the project had already been pushed once, because at that time there was too much rain. François told us that the ground was too wet, and that we needed sunshine.

So we waited for sunshine. And when it finally arrived, it never left.

Be careful what you wish for.

It’s hard to convey how hot it got here without the numbers, so I will give you the numbers. France recorded its hottest day in history on June 23rd, clocking in at 44.3°C (111.7°F) in Pissos, which is in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. Paris hit 40.9°C (105.6 °F). Over 1,000 people died from the heat in this country before June was even over. 845 schools closed. By the time the fifth heatwave of the summer rolled through in mid-August, France had never had a year with five.

We chose northern France in part because we assumed we’d be spared (everybody knows the south is the furnace). We picked the green half, the rainy half, the half with mist, but no region was spared from the heat this year. Ours was just slightly less murderous than the south.

The wildfires were the worst part and thankfully they didn’t reach us. 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) burned in France this summer, more than anything in living memory, and Spain had the largest fire in its recorded history. We were lucky enough that the fires never got close enough for us to even smell the smoke, but I still checked the news every morning like it was a weather report, because that’s pretty much what it had become.

And the heat wasn’t even a wave, really. A wave implies it goes in, and then out again. This came in several weeks long, broke for two or three days, and came back before anything had cooled down. The nights stayed hot, which means you couldn’t open the house up in the evenings. If you opened the windows at 10pm, all you would get was more hot air.

We were told we would be well-protected from the heat inside the stone walls of the château and coach house. And while this held true in the spring, summer told a different story of these old stone homes.

They’re famously impenetrable in the heat. They stand there cool and smug while the new builds down the road cook, and there’s a real, age-old reason for it, which is that the walls are two feet thick and it takes a very long time for heat to get through them. The stones hold in the cold the way a cellar does. Everyone tells you this when you buy one, and for about four days, it’s true.

But it only works to a point. If it’s suddenly 100°F on Monday, you’re fine inside. Tuesday, still fine. By Friday, after five straight days over 100, the stone has been absorbing heat the entire week with nowhere to release it at night. So on Saturday, when the temperature “drops” to 90, the house is significantly hotter than it was on Monday at 100. The walls have become a battery. Everything you loved about the building is now working against you, slowly, at its own pace, and there is nothing you can do to hurry it back the other way.

What was once your savior becomes your enemy.

We had a few truly ugly portable AC units, which saved us, and we adjusted our whole lives to the mornings. Anything outdoors had to be done before 11am, and afternoons and evenings we got very inventive indoors.

So we made the most of it, but this wasn’t the case for everyone. Overall, France caved.

This is a country that has spent decades declining air conditioning on principle, citing the thick walls, the shutters, the seasons, a certain national toughness about discomfort, and general suspicion of AC units making you sick. AC was just for Americans who couldn’t cope (that’s me!). And then this summer the units sold out nationwide, the mid-range ones disappearing from Bricomarche and E.Leclerc and Leroy Merlin within about 48 hours of every heat spike, and installation waits went from three weeks to ten. Yes, the French bought air conditioners, in enormous numbers. Not smugly or ironically or even shamefully, but because it had actually become dangerous.

I didn’t feel vindicated about it. Instead, I felt awful. There’s no satisfaction in watching a country give up a thing it was sort of right about, because the conditions it was right about stopped existing.

Everything went dusty - that’s the texture I’ll remember. Dry and crunchy underfoot everywhere you walked, the grass gone to straw, the gardens absolutely roasted. Every department in mainland France ended up under some kind of water restriction. I found myself actively longing for mist, and dew, and wet leaves and that specific smell, and gutters running, and having to find somebody’s boots. I never thought I would actually miss the mud - the infamous mud I’m always complaining about in my posts.

But the mud didn’t come, because the rain didn’t come.

And still, somewhere underneath all of this, on a spreadsheet on my computer, was a pool completion date of July 21st.

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers, because it’s the details I don’t reveal to the whole internet: what the delay actually was in the end, the guests who checked out of the coach house halfway through their stay and asked for their money back, the promises I made to my 7-year-old and to my nieces that I then could not keep, and where the pool actually stands as of this week.

Castle Diaries is the transparent version of the renovation. Twice a month, plus two additional posts about life in France as an American.

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We had been living here at our new home in rural France for a few months when a neighbor stopped me near the gate and asked what we had planned for the day. “We’re going to Nantes,” I said. “To go to Ikea.”

She nodded, and then asked how many nights we’d be staying.

I told her we were going for the day. Drive down, get some dishes and an armchair, drive back before dinner. She looked at me in much the same way you’d look at someone who had just announced they were flying to Denver for a sandwich.

Nantes is an hour and a half away.

I have thought about that conversation more than she will ever know, and before it becomes the kind of post where an American moves abroad and announces that France has solved traffic, let me say clearly that it has not. Paris has traffic. Lyon has traffic. There are French people sitting on the périphérique at this exact moment having a much worse morning than I am, and if you live somewhere rural in America you probably already have most of what I’m about to describe. I’m also not here to tell anyone that their commute is a moral failing. Plenty of people love the drive! It can be optimized or ameliorated with podcasts, great music, or even a breathing meditation. Not automatically bad.

What I’m noticing is smaller than a country. It’s the 30 kilometers around my house, and what those 30 kilometers have done to my idea of ‘far.’

If you’re new here, I’m Kamille. I write about the culture shocks, the neighbors, and the ongoing project of becoming a local in rural France. Two free essays a month, no charge, no pressure.

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In Los Angeles we had several commutes, and it was considered normal. There was the commute to work, the commute to school, the commute to the good grocery store (which was a different store from the near grocery store and required more forethought). There was a commute to the pediatrician, a commute to a 4-year-old’s birthday party in Pasadena on a Saturday morning, a commute to a work thing we didn’t want to attend and then a second, worse commute home from it at 9pm.

None of this registered as unusual. It was just…the tax. You paid it in 20-minute increments, eight or nine times a week, and you got very good at podcasts, and you developed opinions about surface streets that you would defend at a dinner party.

Here, my kids’ school is 6 minutes away. So is the pharmacy with the green cross that blinks the temperature at you. So is La Poste. So is the boulangerie, and the small supermarket, and the garden store where a man once explained fruit tree pruning to me for about 11 minutes while I nodded along (with the confidence of someone understanding approximately one word in four).

6 minutes. All of it. And I don’t have to leave early for any of it. There is really no version of this drive that goes badly.

For anything bigger we go to the nearest proper city, which is 20 minutes away and which I now describe, out loud, to other adults, as far. Yes, 20 minutes. In Los Angeles that was the drive to grab a decent taco. Here I hear myself say “well, it’s a bit of a trek” and I don’t even flinch.

And the 20 minutes isn’t spent in traffic, because there isn’t any. There’s one roundabout that occasionally contains three cars. The rest is stone farmhouses with their shutters half closed, a field of sheep, a stretch where somebody’s cows graze in the sun (looking healthier than most American humans), and then the road dips and the whole valley opens out, and I have, at least twice, nearly driven into a hedge admiring it.

Yes, that’s what really gets me. Not just that the drive is short, but that the drive is nice.

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Which brings me back to the neighbor at the gate.

An hour and a half is not a commute here. C’est loin. It’s a trip, and a trip gets an overnight bag. It gets discussed beforehand and reported on afterward, at length, to people who ask. If you’re going to hand over three hours of your one life to a car, the French position seems to be that you should get a hotel and a very good dinner out of it, and not just, for example, a washable cover armchair named ROCKSJÖN.

We still do the long drives now and then, for the thing you can’t get nearby, though far less often. And I’ve noticed we’ve gone a bit soft about it. On a trip to Paris this spring, we hit real traffic coming in (true gridlock), and we did all the correct things (a podcast, then music, then the tense silence of two people not saying anything about the traffic), and I could feel my shoulders climbing toward my ears.

That level of traffic used to be a regular Tuesday, and we’d absorbed it so completely that I would have told you, with total sincerity, that it didn’t bother me. Looking back now, I can say that it did bother me, but the difference is that I’d just never had anything to hold it up against.

Happy to have that now. :)

How to Commute Like a French Person (Without Moving to France)

Now, I realize there are few things less useful than the woman who moved abroad and came home with recommendations for everybody. The French people I know who do have long commutes are not ‘enlightened’ about it. They complain (they’re good at that), and then they go and eat lunch for two hours.

It was the geography that did most of the work for us, but something smaller shifted alongside it. We stopped treating the car as dead time to be survived at maximum speed. Nobody needs to move to a hamlet in France with a blinking pharmacy cross to do that, and I wouldn’t offer it as a traffic strategy anyway. These are free, and they work on a freeway anywhere.

Stop letting every podcast be about becoming a better version of yourself. You do not need to arrive at the office having optimized anything. There are people out there making beautiful hour-long shows about mushrooms, shipwrecks, the history of a single word, birds. Choose the birds sometimes.

Try sound instead of talking. Rain, or a forest at 4am recorded by someone with excellent equipment (and questionable sleep habits). It’s strange for about four minutes and then it’s just calming.

Build the playlist before you leave, and put things on it you’ve never heard. Turn the drive into a small act of discovery rather than a rerun. Maybe start with 10 unknown songs, and ask your friends or work colleagues for recommendations. No skipping for the first 30 seconds.

Take the pretty way when you can spare the extra eight minutes. Now, obviously don’t do this every time. Some days you need the freeway and a bad mood, and that’s a legitimate use of an afternoon. But the road past the reservoir exists, and Google Maps will never once suggest it to you.

And every so often, let a long drive be an actual trip. Pick the far thing, the aquarium two hours out, the town you’ve been meaning to see for six years, and give it the gift of an overnight bag and the good dinner. Let it be an occasion sometimes instead of an errand.

The French would never drive three hours for some Ikea dishes, and after three years here I’ve come around to thinking they might be right (though I would like it noted that the armchair has held up beautifully).

À bientôt,
Kamille

Once Upon a Castle is where I write about all of it: the neighbors, the language disasters, the small daily collisions between the life we left and the one we’re building in the French countryside. Free subscribers get two essays a month. Paid subscribers get two more, plus the Castle Diaries, which is the unglamorous working archive of restoring a château without fluent French, a contractor network, or any relevant experience whatsoever.

If this one made you look at your own commute a little sideways, there is a great deal more where it came from.

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Before I owned a castle, I did what any reasonable person does with a dream they’re fairly sure will never come true: I watched other people live it on television.

Specifically, I watched Downton Abbey. I watched Lady Mary ring a small bell to summon Anna, who would appear to dress her and do her hair. I watched Cora eat a flawless breakfast in bed, carried up on a tray by O’Brien, prepared downstairs by Mrs. Patmore, consumed while propped against pillows in a silk nightgown and matching robe, catching up on the day’s events before her feet had so much as touched the floor. I studied this closely, dreaming of such a life.

I’m here to tell you, it is not like that here at our château.

There is no Carson bringing the tea. No Tom to drive us into town. No Daisy to stoke the fires at dawn. It’s just the four of us: me, my husband Sean, and our two small children, rattling around a castle built more than three hundred years ago, along with the forest, the river, and the various woodland animals who were here long before us.

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The short version, for context: we left California a few years ago, rented a farmhouse in the French countryside while we figured out whether we actually liked it here (we did), and then, with careful planning and stubborn optimism, we bought a small French château. It has two pepperpot towers, a chapel hiding in the woods, a gatehouse that once housed the guardien, and a path that loops the whole property where the moat used to run (back when this place was a fortress and was poised for battles). One of the towers holds our spiral staircase. All of it, every stone and every leak, is now ours to bring back to life.

I do have turrets. What I do not do is throw a long golden braid out the window of said turrets so an evil witch can climb up it (although, now that I’ve spent some real time in an old castle, I’ve started to see that story differently. I strongly suspect Rapunzel’s tower stairs were simply broken (as tower stairs often are), or there was a mysterious leak nobody could get a contractor to come look at, and the hair was a temporary workaround that got badly out of hand. I understand her now. I, too, would rig up something deranged before I’d sit around waiting for the man to call back).

We do not spend our days being laced into gowns and gloves and jewels. Nobody does my hair (sadly). We don’t host neighboring aristocrats for tea, or dress for a staged hunt, or get bored on a Tuesday and ask the stable boy to ready the horses so we might frolic across the grounds. We do not have a night nurse who delivers the children, freshly bathed, for one kiss on the cheek after tea and then spirits them away again.

We do all of it ourselves. Which means that we are, as far as I can tell, every single character in Downton Abbey at the same time. We are the family, and we are the full staff. I am Cora (though in outlook and general spiciness, closer to the Dowager Countess) and also Daisy and Mrs. Hughes and Anna (I do dress my daughter and do her hair) and O’Brien and the nanny, and the list keeps going. Sean is Tom and Lord Grantham and Carson (and, let’s be honest, Mrs. Patmore, because he does all the cooking. Bless him).

Somehow we manage, and somehow we even love it, though I won’t pretend it isn’t a staggering amount of work.

Here is what a typical summer day actually looks like.

7:00 a.m.
Our rooster, Mr. Darcy, delivers his opening remarks. It is a hearty, full-throated cock-a-doodle-doo, and it is our alarm whether we like it or not. We get up and put on our finest château-wear. For Sean this is shorts and a t-shirt with a few holes and some stains, one he has formally designated as already ruined so he can stop grieving it while he works. For me it’s whatever’s clean, and a low ponytail I scrape together so fast I come out looking like a minor founding father (there is no one here to impress but the rooster) and no makeup, because there’s no time, and no point (again, the rooster). Then I dress our daughter and do her hair, which is to say I give her the same fast ponytail (Anna would be appalled).

7:15 a.m.
Sean heads out to the chickens (sometimes with the kids) to feed them and collect the morning’s eggs. The kids thunder down to the cave (the cellar, but “cave” is the French term and makes us all feel more medieval) to feed our two new kittens and clean the litter box (a chore they have very maturely taken up). Sean makes the kids breakfast: usually homemade yogurt he somehow produces from fresh organic milk from our neighbor with fruit, or eggs and veggies with toast (you cannot skip the toast here, it’s just too good), sometimes a fruit and veggie smoothie. I slip away to do computer work while I still have both hands.

8:30 a.m.
Comms. Oh the comms! The genteel château pastime of telephoning French people who do not answer. We call the roofer, for roughly the tenth time, about installing the septic ventilation, so that our front lawn will stop smelling like, well, our stuff. We call the plumber (for the umpteenth time) about the heater, which has been faulty since the day we moved in. We call around for a team to help with the next renovation phase, possibly the gatehouse. None of it is fairytale-esque. Just, what needs to be done for the castle.

9:15 a.m.
The pool crew arrives with a small team to fill in some of the trenches they’ve dug and open a new one to carry the rainwater over by the coach house. Sean makes them coffee and chats with them while helping with and overseeing the work. I take the kids: reading, art, an activity book, the occasional hostage negotiation.

10:00 a.m.
We all go outside! Probably the best part of the day. We water the orchard, Sean mows, we water the flowers in the coach house courtyard, and Sean burns off the weeds that keep pushing up through the gravel (relentless intruders). The kids harvest whatever the vegetable garden is offering that day and do lots of running around. Sean and I plant a new camellia, plus kiwis and blueberries and raspberries, and then we get down on our knees and rebuild the stone path in the kitchen garden (which was all but demolished when the septic was installed a couple of months ago).

12:00 p.m.
Sean makes lunch and we carry it outside. Usually chicken sandwiches, some cut up veggies, apples, and, on a good day, passion fruit kombucha (one of our favorite summer staples). We linger after we’ve finished, and the kids run around while we talk.

1:30 p.m.
I head to the coach house to do the unphotographable work: laundry, organizing and folding linens, setting ant traps (the ants have been relentless during this crazy heatwave), cleaning, and then clipping fresh hydrangeas for the vases, because we have guests arriving in a few days (and I’d like them to notice the hydrangeas and not the ant traps).

3:00 p.m.
Everyone comes inside and collapses. Short naps, or a quiet activity like reading, coloring, watching a YouTube video on the best way to remove centuries-old paint, or staring meaningfully at a ceiling beam (usually what I opt for).

4:00 p.m.
I write. This, in fact, is the slot where my Substack essays get written. Sean goes back outside for more maintenance and loads the van for a run to the déchèterie (the dump/tip) or to the donation drop, because this place came with a heroic amount of stuff to sort through (some of it treasure and a great deal of it not). The kids either help him or stage something elaborate indoors.

6:30 p.m.
Sean cooks dinner and the kids sometimes help, and I steal one more hour of computer work (currently: making the information signs for the coach house rental, a job I did not expect to swallow me whole). We eat at our old French dining table. Sometimes a salad with grilled chicken and ripe peaches, sometimes salmon with rice, and in summer, often, Sean’s homemade ice cream, vanilla or passion fruit or raspberry, depending on his mood and the available fruit. Delish.

8:00 p.m.
Cleanup, pajamas, teeth. The civilized machinery of the evening.

8:30 p.m.
More often than not, it is simply too beautiful outside to go to bed, so we head back out into the long summer light and run around a while longer. The light won’t last, and neither will they being this small. Le sigh.

9:00 p.m. (well… more like 10, in the summer months)
We take our time. A lot of reading, a lot of drawing, all four of us together in the bedroom. I usually fall asleep to an audiobook, always fiction. I have enough non-fiction in my real life.

So, no bell rang. Nobody came to turn down the beds or clear away the tray, partly because there was no tray, and partly because the only staff on the premises were already asleep with a chapter still playing. We’ll be up with Mr. Darcy in the morning. That’s the arrangement.

À bientôt,
Kamille

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There’s a little sign that starts going up on doors around here in the third week of July. Fermé or fermeture annuelle. Some are printed, though most are handwritten and taped up crooked, with a reopening date in September that reads a bit more like a wish than a commitment. The boulangerie, the pharmacy, the dry cleaner, the bookshop, the little grocer, the man who was supposed to be building our pool. Gone, all of them, and all around the same time, like the whole country picked a date and I’m the only one who was out of the loop.

The first summer, I didn’t really get it. Now, I know to duck.

We found out the hard way last August, when we were in escrow on the château and trying to get a loan out of a French bank. I’d finally gotten one to take us seriously. Finally! They asked for documents and I would fire every one back within the hour of each request, aggressively American about the whole thing, and then asked when I might hear something.

“Well,” she said, “I’m off on vacation the first two weeks of August. But once I’m back, I can review the file.”

“Okay! No problem!” I said, with a forced smile I had to assemble from spare parts.

I waited, and then followed up mid-month, once she was back (all sun-kissed and refreshed). She told me she’d reviewed the file, but there was just one thing - she now had to bring it to her boss, who was, as of that week, off for the second two weeks of August. So, earliest reply would be the first week of September, probably.

I did the American thing and assumed there had to be a workaround. Some colleague standing in. Perhaps even just one other human being at that bank with a functioning email who was not, at that particular moment, on a beach.

“Everyone is on vacation in August,” she told me, kindly and with a hint of sympathy.

And that was that. Even the bank empties out, and apparently nobody stays behind to keep an eye on things while it does. It delayed the purchase of our forever home by about a month, and we waited it out like the obedient foreigners we are (eventually they said yes, and we got the castle. Ultimately a happy ending).

This year I went looking for a cleaner for the coach house. We’d just finished it and put it up on Airbnb, and I needed someone dependable for the changeovers between guests. Found a local company that does exactly this (cleaners just for gîtes), called them about August, and still somehow managed to be surprised.

“Well, most of them are on vacation in August.”

So August is the month everyone in France wants to come stay at your place, and also the month you can’t find a single soul to clean it, because the people who’d clean it are off being somebody else’s guests.

The pool has been its own saga. The heatwave really did slow things down, I’ll give it that. But the deeper problem was the calendar. It was supposed to be finished by the end of July, which felt safe right up until I remembered what July is followed by. A couple of small delays (which every project has), and there we were in August. August barely counts as a month on the work calendar here. It’s more of a...rumor. Nobody would be building a pool in August. Nobody builds anything in August. It’s the sort of thing every French person already knows and every American has to work out eventually.

July is the really fun part, actually. That’s the month when you keep running into your neighbors and everyone is buzzing with pre-trip energy, dying to tell you where they’re headed and for how long, and there’s a real chance you’ll be handed a phone and walked through the entire Airbnb they’ve booked, room by room. Then, the country takes a breath at the end of July and holds it, and comes back in September with fuller cups and more relaxed shoulders.

One person on holiday is one person on holiday. Sixty-some million of them at once is a different thing, and you can actually feel the energy of it, this drop in the collective blood pressure. The striving and the hustling just stop (so does the bank, apparently).

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The part I kind of love is that everyone is in on it, and nobody apologizes for taking the time. Nobody sneaks it, or pretends it’s a few sick days. It’s expected, employers included, and the law itself is on vacation’s side.

By law, French workers get five weeks of paid vacation, and it doesn’t stop at offering it. The law also makes you take a big continuous chunk in summer, somewhere between May and October. You are, on paper, legally required to relax. Imagine that! Back home (in the U.S.) there’s no such law. None. Zero required paid days off, and the average American takes around eleven days off (and even feels it’s a triumph using nine of them).

For us, the sweet surprise has been the magical vibes of a French summer.

I remember first discovering something different about the light here. It does not quit in the evenings. Still going at 9/9:30pm, and it’s very hard to send anyone to bed while this gorgeous light is putting on a performance. We don’t have the fancy summer camps I’d probably have defaulted to in California, so the kids have just been with us, all day, all summer, and it’s turned into one of my favorite stretches of the whole year. Family is coming this month to spend their holiday here, which means a lot of long dinners outside and, if the pool people ever resurface, a pool.

We even took a trip, which we hadn’t planned to do. Just a small one, to Brittany, eating our way through restaurants and swimming in the pool of the place we rented and making new friends who were visiting from across the world, all while getting a little sunburned. We almost didn’t go, because we’ve been so far down the renovation hole that a trip felt indulgent, almost irresponsible. And then not going started to feel wrong, which turned out to be the best peer pressure I’ve ever caved to. When in France.

The summer evenings we mostly spend on simple things. A bit of fishing in the river (results pending), walks in the forest, board games, long dinners outside. Some nights we just read out loud and draw at the table until 10pm, which is almost certainly bad parenting, and which the kids have loved more than most things we’ve actually planned for them.

The dry cleaner is still shut and I have no idea where the pool guy went, but I’m focusing instead on the relaxed shoulders and the light and the long dinners.

À bientôt,
Kamille

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Become a founding patron

I kept not letting myself type that sentence, the way you don’t say a baby’s name out loud until it’s really coming. But it’s (finally!) done. The beds are made, the books are on the shelves, and a couple of weeks ago we hosted our very first group of guests, who arrived as strangers and left having found the good knives and the one light switch that makes no sense. Nobody asked for their money back, which in this line of work I have decided counts as a standing ovation.

Needless to say, it went well. Better than we let ourselves hope, which felt like a small miracle given how we got here.

Because, well, we did the entire thing during the worst heatwave France has ever recorded. Ever.

I’m not being dramatic here. June 2026 was the hottest June ever measured in this country. Météo-France put most of the map under red alert, dozens of départements at once, the highest warning level they have. Towns all over the place blew past 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), and one afternoon Rennes hit 43, which is nearly 110. Forecasters kept comparing it to the deadly 2003 heatwave, the one older French people still talk about the way Californians talk about specific earthquakes. That was the weather we chose to carry four bedrooms’ worth of furniture through.

We are American, so of course we had already decided the coach house would have some air conditioning. This is not negotiable for us. It is possibly the most American thing about us, more than the peanut butter, more than the constant apologizing or oversharing. And for once our Americanness saved us (o say can you seeeee!) because we had ordered the AC units early, back before the heat actually arrived, purely out of habit.

Then, about halfway through, one of our units broke, and we realized we needed one more.

So Sean went to buy another one. Sold out. He tried the next store. Sold out. Every store within a hundred-mile radius, sold out (the way toilet paper was sold out in a very specific spring we all remember). Apparently the entire country had come to the same conclusion at the same moment, which is how I learned that the French have, at long last, converted to air conditioning. Centuries of insisting they didn’t need it, and then one June they all cracked at once.

Then I called one last store. A hardware store a few towns over. It rang once and went to a recorded message.

I laughed when I heard it. Then I cried a little.

This one’s for paid subscribers. On the other side: what that voicemail actually said, the full before-and-after tour of all four bedrooms, the kitchen, the courtyard and the game room, the piano that arrived at 104 degrees, and the injury my husband still won’t discuss. Paid subscribers also get the coach house direct booking link before anyone else. Upgrade and come see what we did.

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A few weeks ago I made a phone call that rattled me, and not for any of the reasons a phone call usually rattles a person.

We still own a small property in California, which we rent out as a vacation rental. The glass in one of the windows had cracked, so I looked up a local glass company and dialed the number, already bracing. I don’t know what I was bracing for. I think my body just braces now before phone calls, out of habit.

A woman answered. She was warm and clear. She called me honey, with a little Southern curl. She understood the problem before I even finished describing it. She told me what it would cost, when they could come (an actual date and time), and what I needed to do, which was nothing. The whole thing took four minutes. I hung up and stared at Sean and said, out loud, with the astonishment of a woman who has seen a miracle: “Wow. That was so easy.”

And then I sat with the strangeness of that. Because there was a version of me, three years ago, who would have made that exact phone call and thought absolutely nothing of it. Booking a glass repair was not, back then, a candidate for the highlight of my week.

This is what France has done to me. It has made a competent phone call feel like Christmas morning.

Now don’t worry, this isn’t a sad post.

This is not the one where the American abroad tallies up everything she gave up and dabs at her eyes with a linen napkin she bought at a local brocante. And it’s also not the one where everything is bluebells and warm baguettes and I pretend the hard parts don’t exist.

They do.

The life we chose here is, in a lot of concrete and unglamorous ways, harder than the one we left. I am saying that out here because the pretty photos don’t. But it’s a choose-your-hard situation. Every life is hard somewhere. You just get to pick where.

We picked here. Let me show you the math.

The things that America made easy

America is, among many other things, a masterpiece of convenience, and I did not fully appreciate this until I no longer had it.

In America, the world comes to your door. Amazon arrives the same day, sometimes before you’ve fully changed out of your pajamas. Whole Foods delivers your groceries while you’re on a call. You can buy anything, in bulk, in a single trip, and it will keep for weeks, because a strawberry in America has been engineered to endure.

You can call a company and a pleasant person will answer and solve your problem in your own language and it will cost you four minutes.

You can, in short, live at a certain speed. The systems are built for it. The websites work. The customer service exists. The whole country hums along on the assumption that your time is precious and should not be wasted, and there is something quite wonderful about that, something I miss more than I expected to.

We gave the convenience up knowingly. But that easy phone call had one more thing going for it I haven't mentioned: it was in English. Which brings me to the part of this life that's hard for reasons we brought on ourselves.

The language (which is entirely our fault)

Here is the thing nobody likes to admit about moving to a country whose language you do not speak: it is your fault, and it stays your fault.

We could fix this. We could! We could, in theory, sit down and master the damn language and remove 90% of the friction from our daily lives. That we have not fully done so is fully on us. In our defense, we have been mildly busy: raising two small children, being our own bosses, building a new life, and now renovating a château (which is not, in fact, easy peasy lemon squeezy). But the language is the big one, and it puts us at a disadvantage.

For a long time, every phone call here was a miniature torture session. Fumbling, misunderstanding, the panic of realizing the person on the other end has asked you a question and is now waiting. My greatest rhetorical achievement in French for most of our first year was begging people, in broken conditional tense, to please just send me an email. The French phone call is its own genre of humbling, and I have starred in many episodes.

So when that woman at the California glass company answered the phone and simply helped me, in a language I could fully understand, my whole nervous system didn’t know what to do with itself.

But somewhere along the way, without noticing, I got braver. I now pick up the phone and dial a French number knowing it will likely be a small train wreck, and I do it anyway. That’s new. The old me needed things to be easy in order to do them. This me has made peace with the wreck. And we’ve improved with the language, probably more than we give ourselves credit for. It’s still not easy. but I’ve stopped needing it to be.

If you’re new here: I’m Kamille, an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband Sean and our two kids. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the life, the renovation, and the ongoing education of two Americans who thought they knew what they were getting into. Subscribe to follow along.

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Which brings me to the part I don’t usually get into: the actual trade, the one the pretty photos don’t show. What we gave up and what we got. The money, the exhaustion, the extravagant Christmas caroling costume I once pumped breast milk under in a parked car, why my berries now stage a full science experiment on the counter, and the reason we’d choose this hard all over again.

The rest is for paid subscribers.

Paid subscribers get four posts a month: two Life in France essays like this one, and two Castle Diaries renovation entries from inside the walls. Come stay awhile.

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It’s the Fourteenth of July again.

I first wrote this one last Bastille Day, back when roughly twenty people were reading Once Upon a Castle, and I’m fairly sure half of them were related to me. It remains one of my favorite things I’ve written here, and almost nobody saw it. So today I’m setting the table again, with a lot more chairs.

Here’s what a decade of American Fourths taught me, and what one holiday on a French beach undid.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I lived in Venice Beach, California, a place where the Fourth of July arrived each year like a sunburned tidal wave of shirtless barbecues, frat-party energy, cheap beer, and more than a few loud declarations of independence. Rooftop parties blasted music. Roman candles were launched with questionable aim. Someone always ended up doing something patriotic and deeply ill-advised on a skateboard or electric scooter. It was loud, it was lawless, and it was about as subtle as a bald eagle crashing through a Monster Energy ad. Unmistakably American.

I used to brace for it every year. The endless fireworks, the gridlocked beach traffic, the terrified dogs, the babies (mine included) waking up screaming at 2am from yet another illegal explosion launched off a neighbor’s rooftop. And the day-after cleanup, which looked like a Bud Light commercial had detonated on the sidewalk.

New here? I’m Kamille, an American raising two kids in a French château and writing it all down, one holiday at a time. Come along, it’s free.

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Enter: le Quatorze Juillet

Here in France, the national holiday is Bastille Day, or le Quatorze Juillet, as it’s actually called by the French. It commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 and the symbolic start of the French Revolution. Think of it as France’s version of the Fourth, only with fewer flags and considerably less shouting.

Each year, we spend it in Étretat, a stunning town on the northern coast famous for its cliffs and much less famous for its complete lack of drunk people yelling “FREEDOM!” into the night. And during our first trip there, the contrast just about knocked me over.

Start with the tone. It’s the national holiday, and nobody is dressed in French flag garb. Not one tricolor outfit, unless it happened by accident. No red-white-and-blue face paint, no truck flags, no themed sunglasses. I think we were the only people even attempting to color-coordinate (American habits die hard).

That doesn’t mean the French aren’t proud. Oh, they are. They are deeply proud to be French. They just don’t yell about it. They don’t chant it. They don’t need to. The evidence is in the lifestyle, the UNESCO-recognized cuisine, the vacation policy, the universal healthcare, and the fact that people all over the world will climb over each other to photograph a single croissant on a tiny Parisian café table. France doesn’t have to shout to prove the point.

We started that Bastille Day with an early-morning adventure, using the low tide to slip through a secret cave to a hidden beach on the far side of the cliffs. It was surreal and magical. Definitely an experience we won’t forget.

After that, a slow lunch, a hike to the top of the opposite cliff, a wander through gardens strung with art installations, ice cream, and a long lingering dinner. Then we joined the crowds gathering on the beach, not for a rave, but to watch the fireworks unfold across the sky and down into the ocean.

And when it ended?

Nothing. No chaos. No rogue fireworks. No one drunkenly lighting off M-80s at midnight. Just quiet. We went to bed. The children stayed asleep. The dogs stayed calm. Nobody’s car alarm went off. It was, hand to heart, the best night’s sleep I have ever had on a national holiday.

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As for the Fourth of July, we kept that one small too. We stayed home at our French farmhouse, made homemade red, white, and blue ice cream (vanilla, raspberry, and blueberry, if you’re curious), and lit a few sparklers with new neighbor friends. No flags. No frat boys. A little nostalgia, a few smiles, and an enormous sense of relief.

It’s not that I don’t love America. I do, probably more than I realized before I had this much distance from it. I just don’t miss the noise, or the 2am explosions, or waking up to a lawn that looked like the aftermath of a beer commercial.

Today it happens again. The sky over some French beach will fill up, everyone will watch, and then the whole town will simply go home and go to bed. So will we. Not a single dog will lose its mind.

Merci et à bientôt ✨
-Kamille

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At my daughter’s dance performance last month, I spent most of it watching her watch the teacher.

Not the choreography. Not whether she hit the counts or kept the beat. Her face. She kept her eyes locked on the teacher at the front almost the entire time, the way you’d watch a magician you were determined to catch in the act.

The other little girls did what small children do at a recital, which is roughly forty percent dancing and sixty percent scanning the audience for their parents, waving, adjusting their tutus, occasionally forgetting there was a routine happening at all. My daughter was somewhere else. She was studying.

I’ve seen the same thing in my kids’ jiu jitsu class. Both of them. There’s a moment in every class where the instructor kneels down to demonstrate a move, and I can find my two children in the group without trying, because they’re the only ones with their eyes glued to his hands. The other kids fidget, whisper, pick at the mat. Mine watch like there’s going to be a test.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to convince you that my kids are gifted and the rest are hopeless. The other children get the moves. They're bright, they're quick, they pick it all up fine. They're just doing it with their ears, catching the instructor's words while their eyes drift off, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do when the words happen to be your own language. That's the shortcut my two didn't have for a long time. Nobody ever handed them the option to look away.

We moved to France when they were two and four years old. Ten days after we landed, both of them started at an all-French school, where not one person, teacher or child, spoke English. I would love to tell you this was a gentle, carefully phased, expert-approved decision. It was not. It was the deep end. We threw them in, and then I drove home and spent the afternoon fairly certain I had broken them.

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When you're very small and dropped into a room where you understand nothing, you can't coast. You can't half-listen and catch up later, because there is no later, there's only the next thing you also don't understand. So they did the one thing still available to them. They watched. If they couldn't follow the words, they read everything else instead: the hands, the faces, where the other children were heading, how loud a voice got and why. They turned their eyes up to full volume, because sight was the only sense that still worked.

Their French is excellent now. Better than mine, a sentence I say with a completely straight face (and a small internal scream).

But the watching never switched off. It's in them now, the way a first language gets into your bones. So my children read people frighteningly well. Well beyond what their ages should allow.

During the heat wave last week, Sean was low. The garden was taking a beating, it was too hot to do the outdoor work he actually loves, and he was discouraged in the way that’s specific to him, which is to say invisibly. My husband does not announce his moods. He doesn’t complain. Whether it’s a virus or something heavier that’s settled on him for a while, you have to know him for years to catch it, and even then you mostly miss it. I have missed it plenty of times myself.

At dinner, I caught our son watching him. Not saying anything. Just watching, the same way he watches the jiu jitsu instructor. Later, brushing his teeth, he turned to me and said, “Daddy’s sad about something. I can see it in his face.”

He was right. Of course he was right. He had read it off a man who gives almost nothing away, across a dinner table, at five years old.

It isn’t only with Sean. They clock it in strangers, in teachers, in their family members over a grainy video call. They catch a shift in someone’s face before a word has been said about what’s wrong. They’re working off hand gestures and posture and the exact volume of a sentence, the whole channel of information the rest of us mostly stopped reading the moment we could rely on words to do it for us.

I didn’t give them this. I couldn’t have if I’d sat down and tried. It’s the accidental souvenir of a French village school and parents who made a big decision in a bit of a panic and then panicked some more in the car afterward.

Sometimes now I catch myself at the edge of a class, watching them watch, and I think about the version of me from three years ago, white-knuckling the steering wheel, convinced she’d ruined everything. She’d be relieved. She’d also, I think, be a little annoyed that the thing she agonized over for months went and turned out fine without her.

We're an American family raising two kids in a small château in rural France, and I write it all down here twice a month, free. The renovation, the forest, the chickens, and the slightly reckless decisions like this one. If you'd like the next one to find you, come along.

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And I understand the question, because I asked it too, quite obsessively, for about a year before we moved. I had spreadsheets. I had tabs open comparing the prices of butter, gas, and housing. (The butter situation alone could be its own post, but I’ll spare you.) I wanted someone to just tell me the number, similar to the way you want a doctor to give you a diagnosis instead of “let’s run some tests.”

Here’s the honest answer, the one nobody gave me, and the one I’ve now lived inside for long enough to trust: it depends entirely on what you’re buying.

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Because France will silently bankrupt you on some things and then hand you others, the big things, the things that actually shape a life, for a fraction of what they’d cost back home in the U.S. And once you understand which bucket is which, the whole picture flips.

Let me show you what I mean. We’ll start with the part nobody warns you about, which made me slightly cranky for the first six months.

The Small Things Will Get You

Stuff is expensive here. Things. Objects.

If you want to order something off the internet - a lamp, a standing mixer, a Dyson vacuum - you will pay for it, and then you will pay again. France has real import duties and shipping costs that make the casual Amazon-it-by-Tuesday lifestyle expensive and, frankly, a little embarrassing. The thing arrives, you do the mental currency conversion, and you feel like a person who has made a poor decision.

In Los Angeles, I could fill a cart with eleven things I didn’t need at 11pm and have them at my doorstep before I’d had a chance to regret it. Here, that same impulse comes with a tax (a literal one), plus a shipping fee that sometimes costs more than the item. Furniture shipped in, electronics, the random household whatever, a lot of it runs higher than the American equivalent.

And it isn’t only objects. Gas will make your eyes water, priced by the liter (which softens the blow right up until you do the math and realize you’re paying close to double what you did in the States). The autoroutes come with tolls that really stack up over a long drive. Driving here is not the cheap part.

But you also don’t have to drive nearly as much, because the trains actually work. They’re fast, clean (enough), frequent, and they go everywhere, big cities a couple of hours apart, tiny villages on a sleepy regional line, the whole country stitched together by rail. The thing America typically priced as either a luxury or an impossibility is, here, just the slightly boring way everyone gets around.

For about a month I had minor tantrums about the prices of the things. And then I started to suspect it might be doing me a favor.

Because the friction can actually be helpful. The system is gently, bureaucratically discouraging me from buying eleven things I don’t need at 11pm, and it turns out I don’t actually miss the eleven things. (Well, most of them.)

But then there’s the part that makes even the things bucket more complicated than “France is pricier,” and it’s the part the spreadsheet version of me never accounted for.

Unless You Buy Them the French Way

France solved the expensive-objects problem about two hundred years ago, and the solution is that the entire country is one enormous, rotating, gorgeous secondhand sale.

The brocantes. The vide-greniers (literally “empty-the-attics,” which is the most charming possible name for a yard sale and tells you everything about how the French feel about clutter). Nearly every weekend, in nearly every region, people lay out the contents of their grandmother’s house on folding tables in a field, or in front of the village church or castle, and you walk through it with a coffee, and you buy a hand-blown glass decanter for the price of a sandwich.

I once wrote about a chair. A beautiful, curved, vintage rush-seat chair I’d been admiring on the website of a very tasteful Los Angeles site selling French treasures, where it was listed at nearly $300. Months later, at a brocante forty minutes from our house here in France, I found a set of four of its nearly identical French cousins, propped around an old French table.

They were €25. For all four of them.

Sean carried them to the car with the rare smugness of a man whose wife had, for once, come home with a bargain. I let him revel in the smugness.

So the small-things bucket is real, but it has an escape hatch, and the escape hatch is more beautiful than the thing you were going to buy new. You just have to be willing to dig, to spend a little more time, to travel a bit, and to drive home with someone’s deceased grandmother’s chairs strapped to the roof.

Now. The big things. This is where it stops being close.

This is where I open the books. Everything below, the $6,000 question, the school that costs less than a dinner out, the house that changed our lives, is for paid subscribers. If you've been curious what this life actually costs, this is the post that answers it. Upgrade to read the rest, and to get every Castle Diaries and the deeper essays I keep behind the curtain.

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What nobody warned me about were the small things. The ones you can’t find on a “Moving to France” checklist because they’re too specific, too odd, too subtly wonderful to make the official briefing.

About a month ago I wrote about ten small French things that still feel like magic, and you loved it, which tells me I'm not the only one collecting these. Here are ten more that snuck up on me, the ones too specific for the official briefing.

1. The eggs are not in the refrigerator. Anywhere.

The first time I reached for eggs at the grocery store and found them sitting on a regular shelf, room temperature, next to the flour, I assumed something had gone terribly wrong. A power outage. A forgetful stock boy. A French health-code situation I did not want to be a part of.

No. The eggs here just aren’t refrigerated, because they’re fresh enough and unwashed enough that they don’t need to be. We have our own chickens now, so most days this is a non-issue (the eggs come from approximately forty meters away). But every so often we hit a baking streak, or company arrives, and I find myself buying a carton off a warm shelf like a local (which I apparently am now).

2. You’re allowed to keep the bread that’s already going stale, and the moldy berry is your problem.

In Los Angeles, we did Whole Foods deliveries for a while. Once I opened a carton of raspberries and found exactly one with a spot of mold on it. I reported it (to Amazon, because that’s who we placed the orders through) and received a full refund for the entire carton. The whole thing took four minutes and felt like justice.

Here, the bread you buy in the morning is a rock by the day after tomorrow, because there’s nothing in it pretending otherwise. You buy it, you eat it same day or the next, that’s the arrangement. And the berries? I once carried a half-moldy carton of blueberries up to the man at the boutique organic shop here in our little French village, pointed at the offending berries, and waited for my apology.

He looked at me, and then looked at the berries. “Oui, c’est normal,” he said. Yes. Normal. Toss the bad ones, eat the rest with your lunch, why are we still talking, madame?

I’ll get there.

3. The pharmacy is where you go to be taken care of, not just to pick up your meds.

Early on, my son had a cold, so I did what any prepared American does: I googled the French equivalent of Tylenol Cold, marched into the pharmacy, and asked for Doliprane like I was ordering at a drive-through.

The pharmacist did not hand me a box. She asked - what was it for? A cold. What were the symptoms? I listed them. How old was my son? I told her. Then she went off down the aisles and came back with three different things, one for each symptom, and walked me through every one in a low, calm voice that made the whole exchange feel less like a transaction and more like a small ASMR consultation. A saline spray for his nose. An herbal cough thing. Liquid Doliprane for the fever.

And the boxes are small. Five to seven days’ worth, because the assumption is that you will get better. No Costco bottle of 500 tablets. France gives you a little, because a little is what a passing thing requires. They do this with food too, among other things.

4. The stone walls are the air conditioning.

Our first canicule (the gloriously medieval-sounding French word for heat wave), I panicked and ordered one of those ugly portable A/C units off Amazon, the kind with the elephant-trunk tube you wedge out a window. The temperature climbed into the 90s. We ran errands, came home sweaty and braced, and I walked through the door of our 300-year-old farmhouse fully prepared to crank the thing to maximum.

It was cold inside. Truly cold. I asked Sean if he’d turned the unit on before we left. He hadn’t. We checked. It wasn’t on.

The walls are that thick. They just hold the cool the way they’ve held it for three centuries. (Winter is a different conversation, and we survive it, barely.) Just last week I stepped into the coach house we’re getting ready to rent, it was 91 degrees outside, and within a few minutes I was putting on a wool sweater. In June. Inside.

5. In autumn, the men with guns are a scheduled event.

We arrived in August. By September, a text came from our landlord: Don’t walk in the forest today. It’s La Chasse. Shortly after, gunshots. I called, mildly alarmed, and learned that a group was hunting wild boar on the property, which is both a sport and a public service here, since the boar are everywhere and they destroy crops and agricultural land.

Later I looked outside and saw several men in full orange regalia, hats and vests and serious faces, with hunting dogs, parked directly next to our car. La Chasse is its own institution, taken very seriously by the people who do it, down to the last button of the costume. When La Chasse is on, you stay inside, you don’t wander into the trees, and you certainly don’t interrupt. Nobody warns you that “stay out of the forest, the hunt is on” will become a normal autumn text in your phone, right between the school schedule and the boulangerie hours.

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6. The cow manure is a love language.

We live surrounded by fields and pastures. Before we moved, I really wondered how I’d feel about that, and I’ll be honest: sometimes, depending on the season and which way the wind is going, you smell it. The manure. Spread across the crops.

But here’s what I didn’t understand until I’d spent a few seasons downwind. None of this is waste. The manure goes back into the soil to grow the enriched feed for the animals, around and around, and the whole countryside runs on these small exchanges. The farmer comes and mows your field and keeps the hay to feed his horses through winter. Someone brings their sheep to graze a neighbor’s overgrown patch, and now the sheep are fed and the field is mowed and no money changed hands. Farming here isn’t the industrial machine I knew of from back home. It’s family-owned, everywhere you look, deeply respected, and woven into daily life without a single strange connotation attached. So yes. Sometimes it smells. I’ve made my peace, and then some.

7. Cheese is dessert, and I owe my mother’s friend an apology.

When I was about eleven, a friend of my mother’s took me to a fancy restaurant for my birthday. At dessert she said, “Oh, I’ll order,” and proceeded to order a cheese log. A cheese log. I was a child raised on orange cheddar and string cheese, sitting there having pictured a slice of New York cheesecake or, at minimum, a fancy cookie, and instead a wheel of cheese arrived to mark the happy end of our meal. I was devastated. I remember it vividly, the betrayal of it.

Well, I get it now. In France, cheese is sometimes the treat, the thing you close the night with, treasured enough to stand in for the sweet. I still love a crème brûlée. But every so often it's a small thrill to end the night the way that once horrified me at 11. The cheese log finally has my full respect. It just took twenty-some years and moving to France.

8. The dark stays dark, and you can see everything.

I knew the countryside would be dark, with no light pollution, and the whole sky alight with stars each night - the type of dark where you tip your head back standing at your own front door.

What’s specifically different here, at least in our village, is that the streetlights run on a timer. In the depths of winter they don’t come on until 8:30 in the morning, which means you can stand outside at 8:15, in a village, under a full sky of stars, waiting for the school bus.

I don't know why they're set that way. Energy savings, maybe, or nobody's bothered to change them since 1994. Whatever the reason, it buys you a few more minutes of stars before the day starts, and it makes the school run feel faintly like a night mission.

9. The property has a night shift, and we’re not on it.

Some of this isn't French so much as rural, and I know that. A remote corner of the world with enough trees and dark will hand you wildlife wherever you are. But I came from Los Angeles, where the wildlife was coyotes eating small dogs and a raccoon that once held our trash cans hostage. So when the night-vision camera we set up out of pure curiosity gives back a full parade of magical woodland creatures (foxes, deer, badgers who look exactly as ridiculous and adorable as you'd hope, owls, rabbits going about their rabbit business at 3am), I take it personally, as a gift.

And then there are the things that simply grow here without anyone’s permission. There’s a cherry tree down by the river that I’m about 98% certain no one planted, and it’s strong as ever, tall and entirely self-made. We didn’t put any of this here. It was here. We’re just lucky enough to get to watch it, and now care for it.

10. Going from vous to tu is a graduation, and you don’t get to set the date.

This one undid me a little. French has two words for “you,” the formal vous and the familiar tu, and when we arrived I was baffled by the whole system. When do you switch? How do you know? Is there a ceremony?

What I’ve learned is that the switch means something, especially for us (the obvious outsiders). Moving from vous to tu tells you exactly where you stand in someone’s life, how much warmth, how much familiarity, how much you’ve slowly become part of things. We almost never make the jump ourselves, because we still don’t feel qualified to know the moment. But when someone does it to us, it lands like an achievement. Like a door opening.

It can happen with anyone, and faster than you’d think. We brought our former postman, Olivier, a fresh pain au chocolat from the kitchen now and then in our first months, and stopped to chat whenever he came by, and within weeks we were on tu. And just after we moved into the château, a neighbor we’d never met came to the door to tell us when we’d be coming to her house for our introductory visit (also not optional, also wonderful). The next time we saw her, she told us to use tu.

We did. We do.

À bientu,
Kamille

P.S. Nobody warned me about most of this. If you'd like to see it for yourself, we film our life at the château on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OnceUponaCastle

This is the free side of Once Upon a Castle, and there's also a paid side, where I go deeper into the château renovation itself, what's breaking, what it costs, what we've found behind the walls, and it includes monthly live Q&As with us, and much more. Either way, I'm glad you're here. Subscribe free below, or upgrade if you want the whole unfiltered story.

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If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and currently learning that nothing here happens on the timeline you imagined. Paid subscribers follow the renovation in real time in Castle Diaries, which is where this one lives.

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About a week ago, Sean and I stood in the middle of the coach house, surrounded by half-built furniture and cleaning supplies and a green carpet I have personally declared a war crime, and looked at each other, and I said:

What have we been doing this whole time?

We have lived at this château for six months. Six months. And we are only now, in a sweating panic, trying to get the coach house ready to rent in July. If we had started the day we arrived, we would be finished. We would be sitting in lawn chairs. We would be relaxed people.

Instead, we are people surrounded by Allen wrenches, cardboard boxes, and years of accumulated dust and grime.

Here is how we got here.

The plan that wasn’t the plan

When we bought the château, we knew we wanted to renovate the coach house eventually. We did not know in what order any of this would happen, because nobody hands you an order of operations when you buy a 17th-century building. You just start, and the building tells you what it wants, usually at the worst possible moment.

Early on, we decided the coach house should come first. A full renovation, done properly, to turn it into a place we could rent and actually support this life. Smart. Responsible. The kind of decision that makes you feel like an adult.

Then we met with the contractors and architects, and they explained, kindly, that the renovation could not begin until roughly seven months after we signed. Seven months of permitting and scheduling artisans before anyone so much as picks up a hammer. Which meant the real work might start this winter. Maybe early next year.

So we had a choice. Let the coach house sit empty and beautiful and earning nothing through an entire summer and fall. Or spruce it up enough to rent it now, before the real renovation, and make some income while we wait.

The coach house, it turns out, is in great shape. It needs updating (see: the carpet, my nemesis), and it has not been properly cleaned in years, so we have done deep cleans that I will not describe in detail out of respect for you. But the bones are good. It’s genuinely rentable.

So we decided: we rent it this summer, as-is-but-prettier, and renovate it properly after.

Which sounds simple. It was not simple, because of a decision we made on purpose, knowing it would make our lives harder.

We could have just thrown it all together

The easy version of this is obvious. Jump on Amazon. Fill a cart at IKEA. Furnish the whole place in a weekend with cheap things that look fine in photos, rent it for a season, then throw it all out when the real renovation starts.

We couldn’t do it.

Partly because it felt like a waste of money, buying a houseful of furniture we’d discard in a matter of months, then buying all new things after. But mostly because it felt like a waste of things. Furnishing a place solely with cheap, mass-produced things and then sending all of it to a landfill (or a charity shop, where it becomes someone else’s eventual landfill) is exactly the kind of disposable churn we moved here partly to get away from.

So we made the harder choice. We’re furnishing the coach house with pieces we actually love. The forever pieces. The ones that will stay through the renovation and beyond, because we chose them to last.

This is, to be clear, the slow and more expensive and time-eating choice. It is the reason we are in a mad dash instead of a leisurely stroll.

Here is where I take you inside the coach house, and show you what we’ve actually been building (and the piano we did not plan to buy, and the pool that nearly didn’t happen at all).

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