 
Curzon failed to spell out exactly what transpired on the lawn, but Amélie surely saw the effect her portrait had on the poor besotted Briton. She subsequently had photographic copies made of the image, perhaps for other would-be suitors. Small wonder that Amélie was considered a “caution” in her genteel neighborhood in the foothills of the Southwest Mountains, within riding distance of Monticello. For nearly 250 years, the Castle Hill estate has enchanted visitors with its magnificent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mansion, charming gardens, and sweeping vistas. But a rich brew of history informs the place as well, and tales of Amélie continue to be told and retold in the Virginia countryside by old-timers who remember her beauty—and antics—with awe. In her time, Amélie was a celebrity who generated the kind of tabloid headlines reserved today for the likes of Angelina Jolie. She wrote a string of sensational novels that dealt frankly with sex (mostly lots of heavy breathing and passionate kissing, but considered shocking stuff back then) and often featured a main character who was a thinly disguised Amélie at a thinly disguised Castle Hill. She had extraordinary talent as both artist and writer, but her imaginative stories couldn’t top her own personal history, which unfolded like the juiciest kind of pulp fiction. In real life Amélie seemed to bewitch any man who came into her presence. Her first marriage was to a flamboyant (some said insane) heir to the Astor fortune, John Armstrong Chanler, and the pair lived briefly, and tempestuously, at Castle Hill. Rumors floated about that Amélie, the famed chronicler of lust, refused to consummate her marriage to Chanler. The scandals piled up, as did the sales of her novels: She became addicted to morphine, divorced her Astor, and married a penniless Russian artist named Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy after being introduced to him by Oscar Wilde (he said they were the two most beautiful people in the room, so they must meet). Thereafter she was known to wander by moonlight amid the gardens at Castle Hill in a flimsy negligee. A frightened farmhand nearly shot her one night. Celebrities and Ghosts When the money, supplied for a time by the jilted ex-husband, eventually ran out, Amélie and her prince were forced to open Castle Hill to visitors for a fee, though the prince still came to dinner every night in formal white-tie evening attire. By day, he wandered about barefoot. In the late 1910s and twenties, Amélie launched a new career in the theater and became a well-known playwright in New York while hanging out with John Barrymore, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, designer Léon Bakst, and other members of the glitterati. As the years wore on, and her famous beauty began to fade, she continued to attract a stream of writers eager to bask in her reflected glory and eager to meet an early icon of Southern literature. William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and H. L. Mencken, among others, came to visit Amélie. When a Hollywood producer arrived at Castle Hill in the 1930s to secure film rights to one of Amélie’s plays, he was given the guest room in the oldest section of the house. The producer claimed that he was woken in the middle of the night by a ghost who demanded that he leave immediately. The next morning he beat a hasty retreat. Amélie, of course, was not surprised. She and the prince were fascinated by the occult and were known to hold séances in the house. Castle of Fame By the fall of 1938, when future novelist Louis Auchincloss, then a law student at the University of Virginia, came to have tea with the aging princess, he found her living in “romantic, impoverished isolation in a decaying manor house.” To get to the house, he had to find his way through a double row of aromatic box hedges that rose up three stories high and were so enormous that his bulky Pontiac could barely pass through. The awe-inspiring hedges even became the subject of one of Amélie’s poems, which she wrote in middle age. She ends the poem with “Hedges of Box,/Hedges of Magic./…Behind your barrier of glad enchantment/I have rediscovered reality.” The reality Amélie envisioned had herself within the encircling wall of boxwood, still a young beauty of twenty-one, seated on the back of a unicorn. Inside the manor house, Amélie unspooled for Auchincloss stories of her life that were “halfway between a startling truth and a tale in True Romances.” She mesmerized the young student in the formal drawing room, which remained unchanged since the 1840s. There she proudly recounted the illustrious history of her ancestral estate, where, according to family lore, the roster of visitors numbered at least five presidents, including Thomas Jefferson, who played the fiddle there while James Madison danced a jig. Amélie’s great-great-grandfather, Dr. Thomas Walker, a notable colonial-era figure who served as legal guardian for Jefferson, built the existing colonial farmhouse in 1764; her grandmother, Judith Walker Rives, helped design the adjoining handsome nineteenth-century portion of the mansion and laid out the French-inspired gardens. The house passed down through the family for five generations, with Amélie and her two sisters, Landon and Gertrude, last in line. Gertrude brought an additional measure of renown to Castle Hill by starting up her own private pack of foxhounds there and becoming the first woman in the country to serve as master of foxhounds, running twenty English hounds over the hills and fields of her estate and of her neighbors’, a stretch of ten square miles. Till Death Do Us Part Amélie and her family are ever present at Castle Hill. A portrait of grandmother Judith hangs over the mantel in the formal drawing room, and in the library are a bust of the alluring Amélie, and a handsome portrait of a man on horseback on Rotten Row in London, a work done by Prince Troubetzkoy. All of this luscious history was imperiled, however, in 2005 when developers were poised to churn up the estate for a sea of McMansions. Ray Humiston and his wife, Stewart, owners of a nearby farm, stepped in and bought the house and a thousand acres of the property. They placed three-hundred-plus of its gorgeous mountain acres under permanent conservation easement, and everyone in the community exhaled. “Can you imagine a hundred houses in here?” Ray says as he gestures toward tree-covered Walnut Mountain, which serves as the dramatic backdrop for the house. So, the romance of the old Virginia aristocracy, along with a dollop of good old-fashioned scandal, continues to infuse Castle Hill. The grounds of the estate include the original plantation bell, a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century outbuildings, and two family cemeteries. The oldest graveyard lies at a distance from the house, at the base of Walnut Mountain, amid a thick blanket of periwinkle that blooms in April. There lie the remains of the family patriarch, Dr. Walker, surrounded by relatives. But Amélie, who died in 1945, and her prince wanted to be buried closer to the mansion; and so they are, in a small plot just beyond the ancestral ring of boxwood that shields the front entrance to the house. When she was aged and infirm, Amélie resisted the very idea of leaving Castle Hill. “But where would I live?” she’d ask with disgust. “I should never be able to breathe away from Castle Hill. It is the only life I have left.” In her final days, Amélie had to move into town, and two years after her death the house was sold and all of its contents were auctioned off to the highest bidders. While clearing the outbuildings at Castle Hill, the new owners came upon the photographic copies of Amélie’s voluptuous nude self-portrait. The original charcoal sketch remains missing—perhaps hidden away in some local attic, a relic of the siren of yore. |
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