Château des Milandes

Those children are the next room of her life.

Picture a chateau in the Dordogne, in the southwest of France, with turrets and a terrace, and a river running below it in the valley, Les Milandes.

Josephine has rented it since before the war, and in 1947, she buys it, the same year she marries her fourth husband, a bandleader named Jo Bouillon.

She cannot have children of her own, so she adopts them.

The last rooms of her life are smaller.

The chateau is expensive, and the Rainbow Tribe is expensive, and Josephine is not careful with money.

By nineteen sixty-eight, the debts have swallowed her, and Les Milandes is sold out from under her.

There is a well-known photograph of her sitting on the back steps of the kitchen in the rain, wrapped in a blanket, refusing to leave.