On a soft, warm day in June, Taddy Hall, a nineteen-year-old Yale University student, knelt by a stonewall at the Chateau de Ferriers unconcerned that the knees of his Levi's were developing holes. He was enjoying himself immensely.
For three weeks, Hall and his college roommate, Ted Keim, had been salvaging the past, devoting their skills and energies to restoring some small portion of history's bequest to France.
They, and more than a dozen young Americans like them, have savored the pleasures of Student Experience, a program of the New York City-based Friends of Vieilles Maisons Francaises, Inc. The nonprofit, tax-exempt volunteer organization was founded in 1982 to stimulate American interest in the history, preservation, and restoration of historic French buildings, land, furnishings, and art, thus heightening cross-cultural relationships between the two countries.
Friends is a sister organization of Vieilles Maisons Francaises (VMF), which is a privately funded association in France similar to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States.
Boasting thirteen chapters in the Untied States and one in France, Friends has initiated fifty restoration projects in France and another eight in America. It has raised more than seven hundred thousand dollars since 1983, in the process eliciting matching funds--and sometimes a good deal more--from the French government.
Besides helping the restoration projects monetarily, Friends of VMF offers a variety of work-study programs for students, and the opportunity for Americans of all age groups to travel to France to visit private chateaux generally inaccessible to the public.
Recently, the Atlanta chapter of Friends raised ten thousand dollars at an auction to restore the stained-glass windows at a small chapel on the grounds of an eleventh-century Romanesque property, the Chateaux-de-Crexannes, ensconced in the vineyards twelve miles from Cognac. The beneficiary of their largess, French investment banker Herve de Rochefort, in turn feted a small group of Atlantians for a weekend.
The restoration projects of Friends are divided into two central types: One-time specific projects in which donations are made to the delegates of VMF in the different departmental regions of France during visits by American members, and long-term projects made possible by annual prizes and donations. Such projects have included restoration of the Renaissance village Chatillon-sur-Saone, Vosges, and of the abbey at St. Antoine-en-Dauphine, Isere (which was given a donation of twenty thousand dollars in 1988); and preservation of the Maison Renoir at Cagnes-sur-Mer (which received a donation of fifty thousand dollars in 1987).
Student experience
A working exchange program, Student Experience offers American students, ages eighteen to twenty-six, the opportunity to dwell in historic homes and chateaux with French families and to participate in ongoing revitalization projects. At the same time, French students are afforded the chance to live with American families and work at selected sites in the
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