In the servants dining room at the Chateau de Chenonceau there is a beautiful copper water fountain and hand basin (Fr. lavabo) on the wall. Washing your hands before a meal in France has always been important, since Gallo-Roman times and probably beyond, despite modern misconceptions about the levels of personal hygiene in the past.
Handwashing facilities like this would have been found in all chateaux in the 19th century. They are hand made, with brass taps and decorative lines. They were not connected to the plumbing. You can see the tank must have been filled up with jugs of water periodically, and the basin unhooked from the wall, taken away and emptied down a drain or out the window.
Friends of ours, who are the third generation of their family to live in a small chateau near Amboise, have an almost identical set up by their back door. And no, I don't know why theirs is full of golf balls...
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