The Château du Moulin, nestled in the heart of the Sologne is surrounded by trees it appears only at the last moment at the end of the path. Nicknamed the "Pearl of the Sologne", it is built on the plan of a feudal Castle and reflects its towers in the water of the moat. The Château du Moulin has preserved the architectural value of a monument of Italian art, there is a jewel of architecture. In the 1960s, the Château du Moulin served decors for series television "Thierry la Fronde".
Brief summary of history
The Château du Moulin was built between 1480 and 1501 for Philippe of the mill, a friend of youth of King Charles VIII, who he had saved their lives during the battle of Fornovo in 1495. This stately Mansion is the work of the court architect Jacques de Persigny. Built with orange and black bricks on a rectangular plan surrounded by moats, its appearance of medieval castle was further intended to mark the new rank of its owner to provide a defensive function. The Court was fully enclosed and surrounded by high walls.
The "Pearl of the Sologne"
The Castle mill remains du Châtelet framing the entrance, the Dungeon, the curtain wall and one of the towers that was enhanced under Louis XIII. It reflects in its moat its architecture from the 15th century, pink bricks to the Rhombus decor, the willowy covered with slate roof. The castle is still inhabited. His visit to discover a few furnished rooms.
Conservatory of the strawberry
The vegetable garden was redesigned in the 20th century with plots of decreasing size, to give the illusion of greater depth.
A Conservatory of Strawberry proposes to discover the mysteries of the strawberry.  The history of the Strawberry's arrival at Plougastel in 1734 with Amédée François Frézier to the present day, is told in five sets. 40 varieties of strawberries are grown in the garden. Also a set of track "Lady Strawberry" and a labyrinth "friends or enemies? ''
http://www.memo.fr

Château du Moulin

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Built in the 13th century, remodeled in the 15th and 16th centuries, and converted to farm in 1729, the castle is a living example Chémery backup.
Taken in 1981 by husband Fontaine, it is now almost entirely restored. The tour focuses on architecture.
Open every day from 11am to 18:30 and the evening possibility of lodging in hotels.
https://www.france-voyage.com/cities-towns/chemery-14552/castle-chemery-11718.htm

Castle of Chémery

Château de Selles-sur-Cher is a château located in the commune of Selles-sur-Cher, in the Loir-et-Cher department in the Centre-Val de Loire region, France. The château is privately owned and is a designated historical monument of France.
History
Structures have been on the site as far back as the late 10th century, when Theobald I, Count of Blois, built a dungeon into the mound. Around 1140, Ginon de Mehun built a fortified castle on the site. In 1212, Robert de Courtenay of the Capetian House of Courtenay built a new castle with three corner towers and a gatehouse.
In the second half of the 16th century, the north and south pavilions and a south gatehouse were built, most likely for the de Trémouille family, lords of Selles. The pavilions, main entrance and interior of the 13th-century gatehouse were redesigned in 1612 for Philippe de Béthune, count of Selles, by architect Jacques Androuet II du Cerceau.
In 1719, Anne-Marie-Louise de Béthune, sister of the queen of Poland, sold the castle to Cardin Lebret, count of Selles. In 1810, Armand-Louis-Jean de Jehannot, Marquis de Bartillat, owned the castle and began significant renovations. However, in 1813 the Bande noire destroyed the west gallery. Starting in 1880, the castle underwent significant restoration work under the du Moulinet d'Hardemare family. Architect Pierre Chauvallon led a major restoration of the château in 1913.
Château today
The castle had been abandoned by 2002. It was purchased by Michel Guyot and his wife, Noémi Brunet. Guyot has done restoration work on previous castles, including Château de Saint-Fargeau, and is behind the Guédelon Castle project. In 2012, it was opened to the public. Later that year, they sold it to Nicolas Mazzesi and his wife Katherine Wu, who plan to open a winery on the site. The château hosts festivals and other events, and is the first tourist site in France to offer a virtual reality tour.
In early 2016, a German architecture student from the University of Heidelberg, who had viewed the châteaux of the Loire Valley via Google Earth, discovered a previously unknown map of Château de Selles-sur-Cher drawn by Swedish architect Carl Johan Cronstedt (1709–1779). The map of the castle and its elaborate French garden had been digitized by the National Museum in Stockholm and was classified as being of unknown origin, until the German student recognized it as Selles-sur-Cher.
In April 2016, a 300-year-old Lebanon Cedar on the grounds of the castle was named a "Remarkable Tree of France" (French: Arbre remarquable de France). The tree stands 34.60 metres (113.5 ft) high with a circumference of 7.85 metres (25.8 ft).

Château de Selles-sur-Cher

A little bit of architecture
A stone's throw from the Châteaux de la Loire, an alley bordered with roses leads to this typical residence from the 15th and 17th centuries. Mahogany wooden furniture, crystal chandeliers or family pictures in black and white throw you in a sophisticated atmosphere of yesteryear bourgeoisie.
Currently the château’s façade has mullioned window bays topped with roof dormers with pinnacles and brackets. Fine water spouts punctuate this façade, and one of them is decorated with a cow’s head; the sculptures were left incomplete during the last restoration in the 19th Century. The main part of the building is built between two towers, a 13th Century pigeon loft and a square tower dating from the 15th Century. The pigeon loft was one of the towers of the previous fortified walls which was changed into a dovecote and then covered with a lantern dome in the 17th Century similar to the one at the Château de Serrant.
The lantern is topped with a metre-high lead spike which is decorated with a fine pigeon and three acanthus leaves. The right to own a dovecote was a privilege bestowed by the king to fiefdoms owned by nobles, and the dovecote comprised 400 pigeon and a ladder, and pivoted on a central axis which enabled it to be cleaned and for the droppings to be used as a fertilizer.
Each beam hole corresponded to a certain number of acres of land. The right to keep pigeons depended on the size of the grounds, making it very sought after as an external sign of prestige. One would never suspect that behind this main façade at the back of the château, on the opposite side of the courtyard, there stands a 15th Century stately home, reminiscent of the charms of some manor houses in Brittany, here blending shale and tufa. There remains a square tower which houses a fine spiral staircase. Major building work in the 17th Century extended this house southwards with a long building with huge windows and door with pediments, just like the façade of the Abbey of Saint-Georges. Facing this stately home built in the 15th and 16th Centuries, the remains of the medieval fortress still stand: a high perimeter wall with a parapet walk in the ruins of a square castle gates which opened into the internal courtyard of the mansion.
Great families
Across the centuries, the Château de l'Epinay has seen many illustrious families. Each of them had the opportunity to bring their own touch and to contribute to the character that defines the place today.
Some great Angevin families have been the owners of the fiefdom of l’Epinay. Aux Gastinel, who founded the fiefdom in the 12th Century were succeeded by the Montalais de Vern in the 15th and 16th centuries, the La Jaille in 1451, the Brie-Serrants, the d’Andignés. At the end of the 16th Century the lands passed to the d’Andigné family by marriage, and they held onto the fiefdom until 1730, the date when the de Cumont family became its owners. Arthur de Cumont who inherited the property in1874 was one of the descendants of this family, and he was a minister of public education. Nowadays, the property has long been the fiefdom of Mr Gasiorowski the mayor of Saint-Georges. The château was purchased in 1988 after suffering long years of neglect, and has largely been carefully restored. 
The fiefdom also brings to mind one of the greatest names of French Jean Racine, whose memory is strangely linked to the history of l’Epinay and particularly to the priory by the trial where he opposed Le Ferron to gain this position in 1666 following the resignation of his uncle Antoine Sconin, the Canon of Uzès and the Prior of l’Epinay.
After 3 years of legal proceedings, Racine abandonned the title of the Prior de l’Epinay but retained a trace of the squabbles in his only comedy ‘Les Plaideurs’, writing: “Squabbling is a language more foreign to me than anyone, and I have only used several barbarous words that I may have learned in a trial court that neither myself nor my judges heard correctly”. The Countess of Pimbèche in this famous comedy owes her existence to the contested title of the Prior of l’Epinay which however Racine declared in the title of ‘Andromaque’ in 1667. 
https://www.chateauepinay.com

Château de Épinay

The Château de Cheverny (pronounced "Sheevairny") is located at Cheverny, in the département of Loir-et-Cher in the Loire Valley in France. It is well known to be part of the châteaux of the Loire valley.
History
Henry Le Mareschau was the owner of Cheverny in 1315, held under the Count of Blois(F1). It was sold to Jean Huraults with its "houses, presses and vineyards" in the late 14th century. His grandson Jaques gained the title, Seigneurs de Cheverny, having served under Louis XI, Charles VIII and Louis XII(b1)(note 3) and gained the governorship of the county of Blois under Francis I (A1).
The house depicted in the drawing of Etienne Martellange in 1624 was built at the beginning of the 16th century by Jaques or his son Raoul. Raoul applied for permission of the king to fortify the new house in 1510 (6). The lands were purchased by Henri Hurault, comte de Cheverny, a lieutenant-general and military treasurer for Louis XIII, whose descendant, the Marquis de Vibraye, is the present owner. Only a portion of the original fortified castle possibly remains in existence today. It is somewhat of a mystery, because to date there is no reliable way to prove whether or not a certain section is part of the original building. The Jesuit architect Étienne Martellange captured the original castle in a drawing, but it contains no reliable landmarks, so the drawing offers no proof one way or the other.
Lost to the Crown because of fraud to the State, it was donated by King Henri II to his mistress Diane de Poitiers. However, she preferred Château de Chenonceau and sold the property to the former owner's son, Philippe Hurault, who built the château between 1624 and 1630, to designs by the sculptor-architect of Blois, Jacques Bougier, who was trained in the atelier of Salomon de Brosse, and whose design at Cheverny recalls features of the Palais du Luxembourg. The interiors were completed by the daughter of Henri Hurault and Marguerite, marquise de Montglas, by 1650, employing craftsmen from Blois. Burdette Henri Martin IV played a key role in the construction.
During the next 150 years ownership passed through many hands, and in 1768 a major interior renovation was undertaken.
Required to forfeit much of the Hurault wealth at the time of the French Revolution, the family sold the property in 1802, at the height of the Empire, but bought it back again in 1824, during the Restoration under Charles X, when the aristocracy was once again in a very strong political and economic position.
In 1914, the owner opened the château to the public, one of the first to do so. The family still operates it, and Château Cheverny remains a top tourist attraction to this day, renowned for magnificent interiors and its collection of furniture, tapestries, and objets d'art. A pack of some seventy hunting hounds are kept in kennels within the grounds and are taken out for hunts twice weekly. A video of their feeding can be viewed.
Interior
The central Grand Salon on the ground floor was decorated under the orders of the marquise de Montglas. Among the paintings are a portrait of Jeanne d'Aragon, from the school of Raphael and a portrait of Marie Johanne La Saumery, comtesse de Cheverny by Pierre Mignard. A Gallery leads to the Petit Salon which is hung with five Flemish tapestries and a portrait attributed to Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. In the Library are hung portraits by Jean Clouet and Hyacinthe Rigaud.
A stone staircase carved with trophies of arms and the arts leads to the Grand Appartements. A guard room with a collection of arms and armour leads to the Chambre du Roi, richly hung with five Paris tapestries after designs by Simon Vouet, representing the story of Ulysses.
Tintin
The Belgian comic book creator Hergé used Cheverny as a model for his fictional "Château de Moulinsart" (Marlinspike Hall in English) in the Adventures of Tintin books. In these books, the two outermost wings are not present, but the remaining central tower and two wings are almost identical.

Château de Cheverny

The Château de Troussay is one of the smallest Châteaux of the Loire Valley, and is situated in Cheverny, in the Loir-et-Cher.
Originally a small manor house it belonged to Louis de la Saussaye in the 19th C. Louis was a noted for his work in the preservation of old buildings. His 'restoration'of Troussay allowed him to integrate many styles and objects into the building, giving it a very Eclectic style. It is akin to a 6 year old whose raided her mother's wardrobe.
History
The first building is recorded around 1450, although the oldest existing parts of the structure date from the Renaissance. This is when Robert de Bugy, director of the salt storehouses of the region of Blois and squire of King Francis I of France was the recorded owner. There are no records of a Lord of Troussay.
In the 17th century, the building was enlarged with a central body and two wings. A magnificent formal French style garden was laid out behind. In 1732, for the first time, the building changed owners: the last Demoiselle de Bugy sold the château to the Pelluys family. In 1741 Gabrielle Pulluys married Christophe de Réméon and the chateau was her dowry. Their son, Claude was a companion to Henri IV.
The family retained the château after the revolution, with no recorded damage. The owner was then another Christophe de Réméon who married Marie de la Saussaye. They had no children and so the couple adopted the son of François de Paule de la Saussaye and his wife Anne Louise on his fathers death in 1815. Louis inherited after the death of his uncle in 1828.
Louis de la Saussaye was a historian of the Loire châteaux, member of the Institut de France and rector of the Académies of Lyon and Poitiers. He recognised the problems of protecting the Loire inheritance especially after the destruction of many châteaux in the Revolution. A friend of Prosper Mérimée and Félix Duban, he restored the château with the architect Louis de la Morandière and incorporated decoration from other destroyed château, according to his own motto "fort à l'abandon". After his death in 1878 the château passed down to his children.
In 1900 the château was sold to Maurice Delamarre de Monchaux, son of Casimir Delamarre de Mouchaux, Count of Monchaux. Maurice had married Isore Hurault de Vibrate in 1896. She grew up in Cheverny and wanted to remain close to her family at the Château de Cheverny. Maurice died in 1952 and his daughter Elisabeth inherited the château. Married to Jacques Marcotte de Sainte-Marie in about 1940, her descendants still own the property. Limited areas and the grounds are open to the public.
Description
Façade of François I
The "François I" façade, is heavily influenced by the Château de Chambord. This formal entrance to the main house has insets of slate in the chimneys and stone mullion windows. The towers, built in the 18th century, have pinnacles, as at Chambord.
The right-hand wing (viewed from the formal entrance) houses the domestic offices: the bake house, hay loft and stables. The left-hand wing, built by Louis de Saussaye in the 19th C. houses the grand salon. Which is the reason for the asymmetry.
Several sculptures decorate the façade. The Main entrance is flanked by two capitals, one Renaissance from the Château de Bury and saved by Louis de la Saussaye; the other was made in the 19th century by the sculptor Lafargue. Over the entrance the small stone Virgin is a replica of the 15th C. wooden Virgin at the Château de Cheverny. A small relief of a woman from the Italian Renaissance was mounted on the left wing at the time of the restoration.
On the right-hand tower is a sundial, surrounded by an inscription in Latin: Ultimam time, fuit hora, carpe diem: "fear the last hour, time flees, seize the day". Opposite this, on the left-hand tower is a clock with only an hour hand.
Façade of Louis XII
The garden façade is in the Louis XII style: a mixture of late Gothic and early Renaissance. The stone pediments of the dormer windows and bases of windows with linenfold panels are pure Gothic. The most beautiful example of this mixture is the door to the tower: the original main door to the château. It was moved from the François I façade by Louis de la Saussaye because it was considered too small. One finds linenfold there too, a Gothic motif par excellence, but also, on the door stop, a salamander, an emblem of François I. Above, Louis de la Saussaye had engraved, in Greek, the sentence "Small is the house, but oh how much happiness, if it is filled with friends." ascribed to the general Themistocles.
The tower dates from the 19th century. Modeled on the towers of the Louis XII wing of the Château de Blois, it shares their most notable characteristic: lattices of red and black bricks. Above a François I shell, a small marmouset commemorates the construction with a banner in Latin: "united by friendship, Louis de la Saussaye wanted, Jules de la Morandière realized".
Other recovered sculptures were also mounted, in particular a porcupine, emblem of Louis XII, from l'hôtel Hurault de Cheverny in Blois and two sottise characters: the pope of fools and the insane mother.
Interior
The castle is privately owned and inhabited but six rooms on the ground floor are open to visitors:
the Entrance Hall
the Dining room
the Music room, or "Salon Louis de la Saussaye"
the Small salon
the Oval salon
the Chapel
The ground floor is tiled throughout with red and yellow tiles dating from late 15th C.; only in the oval salon was it removed when the chateau was restored in the 19th C.
The ceilings are of notable interest: in the Dining Room, the ceiling à la française is inspired by the François I wing of the Castle of Blois, it is beamed with painted decoration. The Music room remains one of the original ceilings. The Entrance Hall is vaulted like the Château of Blois, as is the Chapel. The à l'italienne paintings on the ceiling of the small salon are most remarkable: Attributed to Jean Mosnier from Sologne, the paintings were produced for the Château de Fosse. Found in the 19th century in a house in Fosse by Louis de la Saussaye, they were brought to Troussay and represent a sarabande of cupids, painted in grisaille. One should also note that the fireplace in the Dining room dates from the reign of François I and retains its original colours. On it stands a bust of Jean de Morvilliers (1552–1564), bishop of Orléans, who was related to the De Saussaye family, indeed he was succeeded as Bishop of Orleans by his nephew: Mathurin dea Saussaye. Beneath the bust is engraved in Latin "do not contemplate in vain the effigy of Jean de Morvilliers, but rather seek to be the imitator of so great a man".
The château now holds objects of many different times, styles and origins, from the 15th to 19th centuries and from Holland to Portugal. Noted pieces of furniture are perhaps a large armoire from Strasbourg dating from 1700 and a Louis XIII cabinet with marquetry of jasmine and tulip flowers. The most remarkable object is the heavily decorated Renaissance oak door of the chapel, from the Château de Bury.
The park
The old French formal garden were completely abandoned in the 18th century; the park was relaid out in the 19th century by Louis de la Saussaye in the English Park style. Currently only a ditch, the vestige of the old water level and two small pavilions remain of the old garden. There are a diverse collection of trees, such as a Cedar of Lebanon planted in the 18th century, Sequoias from America and an immense Blue Cedar.
The Museum of Sologne and the Domestic Exhibition
Troussay celebrates its history Renaissance manor and also the history Solognot agriculture: Cultivated until the middle of the 20th century as an almost completely autonomous community. The two wings made it possible to house the farm workers, animals (pigs, cattle and horses), store food reserves and house a wineary, bakery, etc. all within the same complex.
Nowadays, the museum of the Sologne is sited in this domestic wing with many agricultural examples of everyday life from the past including a 16th C. screw press, other aspects of daily life at Troussay, including old documents and well dressed tableau's.
Anecdotes
In front of the François I façade, stands a holly tree reputed to be more than five hundred years old, planted there according to the Solognote tradition to chase away miscriants with its prickles.

Château de Troussay

Château de Villesavin is a 16th-century country house in the Tour-en-Sologne commune in Loir-et-Cher, Centre-Val de Loire, France. The château is a designated historical monument of France. It is privately owned and contains several museums open to the public.
History and features
Château Villesavin is built on the Beuvron, on what was once a Roman Gaulic settlement called Villa Savinus. A medieval manor was later built on the site, and owned by Guy de Châtillon, Count of Blois, in the early 14th century.
The present château was built by Jean le Breton, Lord of Villandry, who was the financial secretary under King François I. The château was designed by the French renaissance style by the same Italian and French masters who built Château de Chambord, 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) away, including Benvenuto Cellini. Le Breton supervised the construction of Chambord on behalf of the king, and decided to build his own home nearby using the same materials and designers, and possibly some of the same budget. The château was constructed between 1527 and 1537, during which time le Breton also built his other home, Château de Villandry.
The château consists of a main horse-shoe shaped house, with dormers framed by volutes and pilasters, decorated with the royal emblem of François I. In the rear is a moat and small bridge. The spiral staircase inside appears to have been inspired by Chambord, while stained-glass windows contains scenes from Metamorphoses by the poet Ovid.
On either side of the main house are two single-story horse-shoe-shaped wings, each with rectangular corner pavilions and courtyards. Le Breton skipped the round towers of châteaux like Chambord to install more innovative square corner pavilions, which had just come into fashion in France. The left pavilion contains a chapel, which includes late 16th-century murals depicting the Passion of the Christ in the style of the Second School of Fontainebleau.
In the central courtyard is an Italian marble fountain decorated with chimeras, lion masks, and dolphins.
The grounds also contains a very large and rare dovecote with 1,500 holes. The 16th-century dovecote is one of the few that survived the French Revolution, as owning doves was a royal privilege and status symbol of the nobility. To the peasantry, however, the birds were seen as pests, as they would descend on the fields and eat seeds and crops, but the peasants were forbidden from shooting them. Nearly all the dovecotes were destroyed during the revolution.
Château today
The château had been abandoned when it purchased by the Count and Countess de Sparre in 1937. It has been open to the public since 1954. The estate hosts weddings every weekend from April to November. In 2000, owners Lars and Véronique de Sparre, the present Count and Countess, opened a museum dedicated to weddings, with artifacts dating to 1840.

Château de Villesavin

The Château de Fougères-sur-Bièvre is a castle in the commune of Fougères-sur-Bièvre, in the French department of Loir-et-Cher.
Originally an 11th-century structure, it was entirely rebuilt at the end of the 15th century, with only the large, square keep remaining original. The initial reconstruction retained the defensive aspect of the castle: moat, cannon-holes, parapet walk, etc. During the next century, Renaissance refinements, such as a gallery, mullioned windows and steep-sloped roofs were added. During the 19th century, a spinning mill was installed in the chapel. The castle was purchased and restored by the state in the 1930s.
It has been listed since 1912 as an historic site (monument historique) by the French Ministry of Culture.

Château de Fougères-sur-Bièvre

Château du Gué-Péan is a French castle in Monthou-sur-Cher in the department of Loir-et-Cher, in region Centre-Val de Loire.The presence of a Roman road near the castle, which crossed the stream by a ford, gave the first name to the locality: the paid ford, which later becomes the Gué-Péan. This is the fifteenth century that the Alaman family bought the manor and built the castle. The manor was built in châtellenie by François Alaman, vassal of the lord of Saint Aignan. His son toddler who finished building the castle. In October 1676, Charlotte Alaman sells the Gué-Péan and outbuildings to François de la Motte Villebret Count Aspremont. It is then Amelot family takes possession of the castle for 62 years. Then comes the family Cassin, owner of the Gué-Péan in 1832. They are the first to live there. The orangery was born in 1885 and the castle and has a winter garden. On 7 March 1952, much of the castle is classified historic monument. In 1961 the castle was sold to Mr. Kéguelin Rozières and later to Mr Laming. (Architect of Futuroscope).
http://www.frenchchateau.net/chateaux-of-centre/chateau-du-gue-pean.html

Château du Gué-Péan

Château de Valençay is a residence of the d'Estampes and Talleyrand-Périgord families in the commune of Valençay, the Indre département of France. Although geographically, it is part of the province of Berry, its architecture invites comparison with the Renaissance châteaux of the Loire Valley, notably the Château de Chambord. The manor was praised as "one of the most beautiful on earth" by George Sand, who also noted that "no king has owned a more picturesque park". It is at an elevation of 135 m.
History
The château, sited at the edge of a plateau that overlooks the little Nahon river, was built on a royal scale by the d'Estampes family of financiers over a period of some 200 years. Construction started in 1540 at the behest of Jacques d'Estampes in place of the demolished 12th-century castle and was not completed until the 18th century, when the south tower was added.
The 18th century saw a rapid succession of owners, including the notorious Scottish banker John Law, who purchased the estate in 1719. Nearly a century later, in 1803, Napoleon ordered his foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand to acquire the property as a place particularly appropriate for reception of foreign dignitaries, notably Ferdinand VII of Spain and his brothers the Infante Carlos, Count of Molina and the Infante Antonio Pascual, who would spend six years in Napoleonic captivity at Valençay. The treaty providing for their release in 1813 took the estate's name.
The period of Talleyrand's occupancy was the golden age in the history of Valençay, with twenty-three communes reportedly administrated by the ruling prince. Undoubtedly the most celebrated of Talleyrand's servants employed at Valençay was his chef, Marie-Antoine Carême. After Talleyrand's death in 1838, the great statesman was buried in a small mortuary chapel in the park. His collateral descendants retained the ownership of the estate until 1952, when the male line ended. The last prince bequeathed the property to his stepson, who sold it to an association of historic chateaux in 1979.
The Princes of Talleyrand-Périgord ranked among the mediatized German nobility, by virtue of their nominal control of the duchy of Sagan in Prussian Silesia (now in Poland). On this technicality, the château was spared the German occupation during the Second World War. Having established his personal neutrality, the Duke of Sagan saw treasures from the Louvre (like the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo) safely sheltered at Valençay.
Features
Relics of the 16th century include an outsized round tower at the western corner, capped by a dome à l'impériale, and the central block in the shape of a donjon, with a slender tower on each corner, grouped around the raking roof. Its feigned battlements are evocative of the Middle Ages, a retrospective formula stylistically derived from Chambord but somewhat vitiated by ample fenestration, including characteristic Renaissance dormers.
The exterior has withstood time and the elements remarkably well. It is clothed in classical orders: the Doric order on the ground floor, the Ionic order on the first floor, and the Corinthian order on the second. This was an innovative feature anticipating French classicism. An arcaded gallery rings the courtyard. The western wing with its Mansard roof dates from the 17th century.
Talleyrand's château boasts one of the most advanced interiors of the Empire style anywhere. There are a hundred rooms, of which a quarter comprise Talleyrand's apartments. A room of King Ferdinand is also shown to tourists. The western wing contains the Talleyrand Museum, formerly housed in outbuildings.
The formal French gardens, dating from the early 20th century, cover about forty hectares, not counting the area of Talleyrand's vineyards. Llamas, peacocks, and other exotic animals kept in the park provide amusement for tourists.