Breaking Old Ground

In the medieval hamlet adjacent to the castle, Diana Hajdu, a former lawyer from Paris, is busy making hundreds of decorative clay tiles in preparation for the day a decade from now when the castle’s floors will be finished. The eight years she’s put in thus far may one day come to naught, as the kiln she will use to perfect her firing technique has yet to be built. She has no idea if her tiles will withstand thousands of footfalls, but she keeps pressing clay into her moulds, undeterred. When she’s finished with the floor, another 78,000 tiles will be required for the roof.

Many of the site’s full-time workers have pledged decades to the project, but they haven’t come on board simply because they believe in Guyot’s vision: Guédelon is their employer, and they are paid salaries and receive benefits. Administrative director Maryline Martin says that 90 percent of the workers are not skilled labourers, but “intellectuals.” Guédelon lets them work on something larger than themselves—even if some may not see the castle completed during their lifetimes.

Last year 220,000 visitors stopped by to see workers harvesting oaks and shaping them into beams, or splitting massive rock slabs into manageable chunks, which stonecutters custom-chisel into blocks for masons, who then assemble walls like elaborate jigsaw puzzles.

“It’s not a museum,” says Renucci. “You don’t push buttons or see a film. Here it’s direct interaction between the public and the workers.” At six to eight euros a pop, tourism keeps the venture in the black, but it also invites some grumbling from purists. “Some critics call it Disney, fake,” Martin frets, “because we make money and are open to the public.”

Unlike the Realm of the Mouse, though, Guédelon is no phony fantasyland. Inhale the smoke, stir the mortar, absorb the utter silence save chisel blows ringing into stone: the primal smells, textures, and sounds of Guédelon convincingly evoke another era. Every corbel, lintel, and murder hole will be in working order, and, in the unlikely event of an attack, a defending soldier will be able to retreat up the spiral staircase (designed to thwart right-handed attackers), raise the wooden drawbridge, or sneak out the postern for a midnight sortie.

But then, utility isn’t really the point. A castle could be built more efficiently with backhoes and pneumatic drills, but that would only mirror the twenty-first century, not open a window to the thirteenth. What drives the dream is not the finished product, but the process. “It will be less interesting once it’s done,” Guyot laments.

Back at the castle, another day of chipping rock, hewing beams, and forming tiles has ended. At 6 p.m.—quitting time—a worker blows a horn. Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 5 , 2005, will be much the same as today, as will April 5, 2006, and April 5, 2016. But no one seems discouraged. When a visitor asks about the day’s progress, one of the masons raises his hands, measures a space in the air about a foot high, and calls out excitedly, “Tell the world we did this much today!”