Boston Athenæum

May 23, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In the 1950s, soon after the end of World War II, four-year-old Thad Carhart’s family—his NATO officer father, his mother, and his four siblings—packed up their suburban life in Arlington, Virginia, and moved to Fontainebleau, France, a lively provincial town surrounding a sprawling masterpiece of French architecture, the Château of Fontainebleau. In his new memoir, Finding Fontainebleau, New York Times bestselling author Carhart intertwines stories from his family’s years living in the shadow of the Château with the stories of the palace itself, from its heyday as the preferred royal hunting retreat to today, when efforts are underway to restore it to its former splendor. Against the background of the rapid modernization of France in the 1950s stands the Château of Fontainebleau, an anchor against the seas of time. Begun in 1137, fifty years before the Louvre and more than five hundred before Versailles, the Château was a home for Marie-Antoinette, François I, and the t