Ferdinand Cheval: The Postman Who Delivered a Palace

“This is the story of its creation,” says author Anne Renaud in the opening pages of Ferdinand Cheval: The Postman Who Delivered a Palace. Technically speaking, Ferdinand Cheval did not deliver a castle; he built one. One day in 1879, while delivering mail on foot along his some 32 kilometer mail route in rural France, postman Cheval literally stumbled over a rock. Picking it up, he marveled at its beauty, stuck it in his mail bag and took it home. In the days and weeks that followed, Cheval collected more such rocks before wondering if he could transform these objects of nature into something even more beautiful, and he began by creating a water fountain, then a grotto and a passageway. Over the next 33 years, Cheval kept adding to his creation that became increasingly more intricate and larger, concluding in what Cheval called his “Ideal Palace” (Le Palais Idéal). Given that Cheval was not a trained architect, sculptor or builder, what this self-taught creator produced was (and remains) truly amazing, but, before the praise, came years of mockery and derision.

A closing one-page “Author’s Note” provides further information about the palace, its creator and his possible motivations in creating the structure. That page also contains a small colour photo of some details of a portion of the structure while the facing recto provides a full-page colour image of the palace. Additionally, three small black and white views of Le Palais Idéal can be found on one of the closing text pages.

Illustrator Ana Salopek’s spreads are awash in flowing colour and, like Cheval’s Le Palais Idéal, are filled with detail. Her illustrations perfectly complement Renaud’s tight, poetic text.

Ferdinand Cheval: The Postman Who Delivered a Palace would pair well with Beth Anderson’s Franz’s Phantasmagorical Machine, the story of Franz Gsellmann, a 20th century Austrian, who, like Cheval, was initially mocked for his creation, in this case a “machine” that took him more than two decades to create but which is now a tourist attraction.

While Le Palais Idéal is but an eddy in the river of history, its creation and creator can serve as inspiration and validation for the “dreamers” in our classrooms.