Imagine a French museum that’s second only to the Louvre when it comes to paintings, with an eye-watering collection of manuscripts. Add to that a grand château with a turbulent history going back to the 16th century. Plus period kitchens (one tragic chef committed suicide when it seemed that the delivery of fish for the court’s Friday dinner would not arrive in time. It did arrive but only after he’d thrown himself on his kitchen knife).
Imagine, too, that it’s in splendid grounds, with formal gardens and naturalistic landscape beyond. Then throw in the biggest, grandest stables in Europe, housing a museum all about horses — from their history to their equipage — plus actual horses, from dear little Shetlands to an enormous shire, which perform in a historic mini-amphitheatre. Add to that the equivalent of the Ascot racecourse next door. Plus, for greedy pigs, a food product that you would actually travel to eat, in a bucolic setting. That, folks, is the Musée Condé, set in the Château de Chantilly. It has all the above, and — drumroll — it’s only 40 km from Paris.
So why, I asked myself, when I finally got to visit the museum, had I never heard of it? Picardy is woefully underappreciated in general but the way this museum has not registered on visitors’ radar is simply baffling, until you factor in that it hasn’t been able to afford much in the way of marketing. But given the gruelling ordeal that a visit to the Louvre entails, it’s extraordinary that more of us have not gravitated north of Paris to the former home of the princes of Condé. Its history is fascinating. One of the centres of court life under Louis XIV (Molière, Racine and Corneille all produced plays in thetheatre), its buildings were converted into a squalid prison during the French revolution, then almost entirely dismantled by the notorious Bande noire asset-strippers, transformed into a military school, passed into the hands of Coutts bank and then, during the first world war, became the headquarters of the French army.
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