French vs. American Style: the du Pont Estates in Delaware

Nemours dining room, photo by Charles Brown

                

                 Delaware is home to two famous du Pont estates that reflect the distinctive aesthetics of their owners. In 1907, Alfred I du Pont built an 18th-century style chateau on 3,000 acres hat he named Nemours for the French town of his great-great grandfather. Winterthur, on the other hand, evolved from a 12 room house buit in 1841 to a 175-room mansion that Henry Francis du Pont intended to house his collection of American antiques and to serve as museum and resource for American style.

On the American side

This rivalry between French and American style is one of the  themes of the exhibit currently on view at the Winterthur Museum: Jacqueline Kennedy and H. F. du Pont: From Winterthur to the White House. When Jacquelin Kennedy undertook a project to restore the White House to the glory it lacked at the time, she enlisted the help of the H.F. du Pont. He steered her toward American style over French -- the style she had personally preferred

 

He also steered her toward authenticity even at greater experience. The strongest example of that was his advice to spend $12,500 to obtain the actual Zuber wallpaper for the White House Reception Room rather than to commission a copy for a fraction of the cost. Incidentally, the man who sold the committee the wallpaper --Peter Hill -- had purchased it for a mere $50, though he had to take it down himself  before the house in Maryland that had it on the walls was demolished.

Winterthur, photo by Ariella Brown

View of the back of the house from the Reflecting Pool area, photo by Ariella Brown

H.F. du Pont had a great passion for American artifacts, history, and gardening. The Winterthur Museum and Garden (there's also a library, though it was closed to the public when I visited) are all a testament to that. For the cost of general admission of $22, you'd gain a two-day pass that entitles you to museum admission (not in the house itself) with the option for a tour, a house tour (where you only get to see about a dozen out of the 175 rooms) and garden tour that covers a small part of the 60 acres of gardens plus as much walking around the 1,000 acres of the estate as you're up for. 

Most of the ceilings at Winterthur have a perforated coverto allow electricity to get through. I have to say that I find it really detracts from the effect of the rooms so carefully set up to reflect a set period.

      Half of one of the symmetrical rooms in Winterthur, photo by Ariella Brown

                                View on the estate, photo by Ariella Brown

Spring seems to be the ideal season to come to see the millions (yes, that many) of bulbs come into bloom that change over the colors you'll see no less than three time in the space of a month, according to our guide. Another garden highlight are the thousands of azalea bushes that would be at their peak in April and May. But no matter what time of year you visit, you can delight in the Enchanted Woods See photos below:

   Child's playhouse with thatched roof, furnished table, benches, chairs, and a working fireplace in the Enchanted Woods  

You can also indulge your whimsical side at Winterthur by stopping in to see  the Campbell Collection of Soup Tureens right next to the museum building. The designs to range form the subline to the ridiculous with some that would look like what you might find in your grandmother's collection, while others would make you wonder: "What were they thinking?"

                             What else would you serve turtle soup in but a silver tureen shaped like a turtle?

                 .
On the French side

While Nemours doesn't boast a museum or the particular delights of a child's garden, the architecture of the house and the view of the splendidly appointed rooms, plus the exquisite layout of the formal gardens adorned by fountains that all seemed to work (unlike the ones in Kykuit) and a collection of gnomes beyond the standard bearded men, scattered around the place are  well-worth the cost of $20 for the day-pass  for access to the house and grounds. Both estates offer shuttles to carry you from one point of interest to another if you tire of walking. 

Nemours Estate: all Nemours photos here by Charles Brown

  

                                                   Nemours conservatory

Four things you get to see in Nemours that are  not on public view at Winterthur: bedrooms, a bathroom made for the house, a laundry building, and a garage with beautiful  vintage cars..

                                         

                                       Laundry required using a washboard in large sinks

As you may have observed, I was able to post a lot of pictures here. That's because there are absolutely no restrictions on photography in these du Pont estates -- only a bar on using flash indoors. In contrast, Kykuit prohibits any photography inside -- even in the garage that houses the cars. It also does not allow visitors to roam the grounds freely at their own pace. Consequently, I would say that the Delaware estates are both a better value and friendlier as attractions. Just they are quite a distance to travel from New York. 

Related: 
Art, Architecture, or Parkland: Contrasting Estates of the Rockefellers
Restoring a garden and some history in Yonkers
A grand vision of Victorian architecture and engineering
Have desk, will travel travel

Orwell's Down and Out

Review of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. (Harcourt, 1933). You can read it online at http://www.george-orwell.org/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London
Warning: this book may change your view of Orwell (who was born Eric Blair in 1903 in India) and will most likely turn you off eating in restaurants. 

This book vividly illustrates Orwell’s first-hand experience of poverty. After running out of money in Paris and pawning what he could, he works as a plongeur, a sort of combination dishwasher and general help behind the scenes in a hotel or restaurant kitchen. That’s where you get the details about how very far from sanitary the conditions are – even at expensive establishments. 

Later on he returns to England on borrowed funds, but his new employer is not yet around, so he is reduced to tramping and staying at prison-like homeless shelters, which he calls casual wards and experienced tramps call a “spike.” He gives a glossary of such terms in chapter 32 and then proceeds to analyze the progression of swear words with contrasts between French and English usage. This is rather amusing in this edition because no word beyond “bloody” gets spelled out. Every other word is signified only by _, so the reader really does not know which word he has in mind when he says “For example, __” (p. 177). Here he also remarks on the surprising fact that “cow” is the worst insult for women in both France and England, despite the fact that “cows are among the most likeable of animals. Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning; words, especially swear words, being what public opinion chooses to make them” (p. 178). He also notes that an Englishman will desist from swearing in front of a woman, though a Frenchman does not, and French women swear themselves.

Orwell does not just analyze language here, but the attitudes towards the poor. He concludes that the poor are kept down and wrongfully classified as being of a different order than those with more money. He is highly critical of the social policies set up for the homeless in England. He argues that both the French plongeur and the English tramp is cut off from what is considered normal life because he cannot marry. The working man doesn’t have the time or the money with 15 hour days being the norm and wages just adequate to keep him alive with an occasional night out drinking. The tramp, he says, also does not have access to women. He ponders why there are so few women tramps and concludes that a woman is better off because she has the option to attach herself to a man and not suffer as much from poverty. That conclusion astounded me because Orwell constantly refers to prostitutes and includes a story told to him in Paris in which a young man boasted of the pleasure he had in abusing a young woman who was likely sold into the brothel by her parents. Victor Hugo depicted the fall into poverty of such women very well in Les Miserables, but Orwell does not give any thought to their point of view with all his pondering on the wrongs of society and the mistreatment of the poor. 

The book is filled with numerous character sketches and anecdotes. In England, we meet a “screever,” a pavement artist. Though he can earn quite a bit when times are good, he earns nothing from his craft on rainy days, and his life is nothing like the sunny one Dick Van Dyke portrays in the character of Bert in Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins - Bert The Pavement Artist) . In Paris, Orwell teams up with the Russian Boris who recounts the rather funny way he got out of his vow to a saint – and he is a self-declared atheist. There are also characters who tell stories about other people. One involves an elaborate scheme to smuggle cocaine into England from France. When the police come, the ones who have it try to pass it off as face powder, and … well, I won’t give that away. But the mastermind of the scheme and the swindle in the story is a Jew. 

Any time a Jew is mentioned, it is to bring up a bad character. Orwell even quotes a saying in chapter 13: “Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian.” And he takes that as absolute truth in connection to a story about being cheated by a man he took to be an Armenian. The pawn broker who cheats his customers is a Jew. And Boris who is reduced to sharing the room of a Jew when he has no money considers himself to have descended to the lowest depths because Russians consider Jews too lowly to spit upon. Orwell also shows his prejudice toward other races. In chapter 22, when he insists on the equality of men of all classes in these terms: “Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men.” He also seems rather appalled to see that blacks are allowed into the same casual houses as white. Though Orwell may be liberal in his view on the working poor and the destitute, they do not extend to women, minorities, or Jews.