The lords of Beaugency attained considerable importance in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries; at the end of the 13th century they sold the fiefdom to the Crown. Afterward it passed to the house of Orléans, then to those of Dunois and Longueville, and ultimately again to that of Orléans. The city of Beaugency has been the site of numerous military conflicts. It was occupied on four separate occasions by the English. On June 16–17, 1429, it was the site of the famous Battle of Beaugency, when it was freed by Joan of Arc. Beaugency also played an important strategic role in the Hundred Years´ War.
The 36m high square tower of Château of Beaugency was built in the 12th century. In the 1530 cardinal Le Longueville ordered bo enlarge the keep as a larger castle. It was burned by the Protestants in 1567 and suffered extensive damage to the walls, the castle, and the church.
https://www.spottinghistory.com/view/1316/chateau-de-beaugency/

Château de Dunois

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The Château de Meung-sur-Loire is a former castle and episcopal palace in the commune of Meung-sur-Loire in the Loiret département of France.
The château, located next to the collegial church, was the country residence of the Bishops of Orléans. It was built and destroyed several times. The oldest still existing parts date from the 12th century and were built by Manassès de Seignelay (bishop from 1207 to 1221). Still standing are the main rectangular plan building, flanked by three towers, a fourth having been destroyed. It was occupied by the English during the Hundred Years' War. The rear façade was rebuilt in the Classical style by Fleuriau d'Armenonville (bishop from 1706 to 1733). Beneath the castle are dungeons, a chapel and various medieval torture instruments, including one used for water torture.
It has been listed since 1988 as a monument historique by the French Ministry of Culture. It is open to the public.
History
The first castle was built in the middle of the 12th century. It consisted of a square tower built against the south face of the church bell tower, itself abutting in the south two round towers. In the 13th century, the bishops of Orléans abandoned the castle and it was used as a prison. Among those incarcerated there was the poet, François Villon. From 1209, construction began of a more important castle, rectangular in plan, with a tower in each corner. The guard room, the lower hall with ogive vaults and the cellars are the last elements which constituted the 13th-century castle, the episcopal palace at that time. During the Hundred Years' War, the building was transformed into a fortress; it was taken from the English by Joan of Arc on 14 June 1429. At the end of the 15th century and start of the 16th century, building to the north incorporated a tower with a drawbridge. The castle was abandoned from the Wars of Religion until the start of the 18th century, when Bishop Fleuriau d'Armenonville undertook the transformation of the structure into a comfortable residence. The central part of the main building was replaced by a cour d'honneur. The façades' openings were made symmetrical and redesigned in the Classical style. Similarly, the tower openings were remade and lost their machicolation. In the middle of the 18th century, a wing was added to the south east with a staircase serving the upper floors of the wing. In 1784, the chapel was built in the Neoclassical style, with sculpture by Delaistre. The two pavilions in the grounds are contemporary with this chapel.
Currently
In 2016, the château hosted a fashion show shortly after Paris Fashion Week, celebrating historical fashion and displaying the evolution of fashion from antiquity to the First World War.

Château de Meung-sur-Loire

This 17th-century family château has been standing for 300 years, close to Orléans and the Loire Valley Chateau, along with its stables, barns, chapel, wash house, dovecot. There is also a river, animals, a park  and a heated swimming pool. It is spacious, rich in atmosphere and an ideal location from which to explore the History, which you can discover through the large rooms, decorations and accessories. French Art de vivre.
https://www.chateau-latouanne.com

Château de la Touanne

Le château de Bois-Glaume est un château français du xviiie siècle situé en Bretagne, dans la commune de Poligné, en Ille-et-Vilaine, à 29 kilomètres de Rennes. Il remplace un ancien château médiéval. Le château de Bois-Glaume est inscrit au titre des monuments historiques depuis 1972.
Le château
Le domaine, appartenant autrefois à Guillaume, seigneur de Poligné, était une ancienne châtellerie exerçant un droit de haute justice en Bretagne. Le château d'origine était un bâtiment médiéval, remanié à la renaissance. Il sera détruit au début du xviiie siècle afin de laisser place à l'actuel château. Celui-ci est entouré d'un grand parc, planté principalement de chênes centenaires, et d'un étang.
Le château est resté à l'abandon durant près d'un siècle avant d'être repris et restauré par l'actuel propriétaire, Mme Berthélémé, qui en fait des chambres d'hôtes.

Château du Bois Glaume

The Château de Talcy is a historical building in Talcy, Loir-et-Cher, France. It lies to the north of the Loire River, in the Loire Valley, known for its 16th-century châteaux. From a fortification in existence in the 13th Century additional wings were added in the 1620s. Modernised in the 18th Century the interiors have been preserved. A Historical Monument first registered in 1906 it has been owned by the state since 1933. It is open to visitors.
History
It was first referenced in an act in 1221, although no description of the building is given.The title of Seigneur de Talcy was used in reference to the St Lazare family. It was bought in 1466 by a Parisian lawyer: Pierre Simon. The central tower was built by the Simon family in 1480. Three generations of the Simon family lived there before the family line died out on the death of Jean Simon, Bishop of Paris in 1502. His sister, Marie was the final owner. The building was bought from Marie Simon in 1517 by Roberto Bernard Salviati, a Florentine banker and his wife Francoise (née Doucet). Bernard Salviati requested that the building be fortified, the request was granted in 1520 by Jean d'Orleans-Longueville, archbishop of Toulouse and Seigneur of Beaugency. However limitations were placed on Salviati as to Seigneural rights: he could not keep an armed guard. Salviati was in a difficult situation, needing to be close to king François 1, as his banker yet not a French citizen.
The estate is better known in literary, rather than architectural history. Salviati's daughter and granddaughter, Cassandre and Diane, were the muses of two leading French poets of the time, Pierre de Ronsard and Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné, respectively.
Ronsard fell in love with the 15-year-old Cassandre in 1545, whom he met at a ball in Blois. He dedicated to her some of the best known sonnets in the French language. They were not allowed to marry as Ronsard was not considered a suitable match. She was married to Jean III de Peigné in 1546. Diane was the daughter of Cassandra's brother Jean Salviati. D'Aubigné, dedicated to Diane in 1571 the collection of sonnets, ballads, and idylls entitled Le Printemps and at her death the finest of his poems, Les Tragiques. Due to his strong Hugonout religion and her Catholism the couple were unable to marry, her family objected most strongly.
In the château is the "Chambre de la Médicis" where Catherine de' Medici and her son Charles IX are said to have planned the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day during the "Conference of Talcy" 28 and 29 June 1572.
Jean Salviati, Seigneur de Talcy passed the château to his son Foréze Salviati and it then passed to his daughter Isabella Salviati, who extended the east wing of the chateau in 1638, when the gable of the church was rebuilt. Isabella had bought the chateau from her mother (Isabeau née Sardini) although she was married to Louis de la Marck, with whom she had 4 children. There are engraved marks of YS on the doors of the tower, denoting Isabella Salviati. The Salvatie family sold the estate in 1682. Although this may have been earlier as Antoine de Preuilly was registered to have sold it to Blanchard de St. Martin in 1674. From there the house was passed down through the family and it is known that Jeremie's Burgeat had inherited it,recorded on his accent to the peerage in 1720. The Burgeat family owned the property between 1704-1780. They carried out extensive modernization of the building and redeveloped the gardens. Andre Burgeat sold the chateau in 1780 to Elizabeth Gastebois.
The Gastebois family, from La Rochelle were a Huguenot family and Elizabeth (1758-1830) had married Francois Charles Vincens (1757-1796), the Vincens being also Huguenot. Their daughter Marie Madeleine Pierrette Vincens married Philipp Albert Stapfer in 1798 and their family moved into the Chateau.
The chateau remained intact throughout the revolution due to the families (Gastebois, Vincens & Stapfer) strong egalitarian beliefs. Philipp and Marie had 2 sons Charles Louis(1799-854) and (Frederic) Albert(1802-1880). Charles Louis was the father of Paul Stapfer.
Albert spent his youth as a liberal journalist for 'le Globe' and continued to support egalitarian policies, manning the barricades in the 1830 revolution. Retiring to Talcy after his marriage to Clarey Louise Vincens in 1835, he gained an interest in Daguerreotype's, taking a series of pictures of the Chateau, still on view there.
During the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Albert hosted General Antoine Chanzy there, but he was driven out by the Prussians in the Battle of Beaugency (1870) in December 1870.
Albert died there in 1892, leaving it to his 3 children: Leon (Protestant minister at Jones, Le Mans and Blois), Helene Genevieve (married Etienne Debate) and Valentine. Leon retired to Talcy in 1906 and died in 1930. In 1933 Valentine and Helene Genevieve sold it to the state, on condition that the 18th-century interiors would be preserved intact.
The château is visited by 20,000 tourists annually.
Architecture
The central square tower, is likely the remains of the 1480 building with dramatic fortifications that were added in the 1520s.
There are no accurate records currently available as to the extent of the building at this time, but a later drawing shows 2 wings, on either side of the tower. The east wing also extended north to meet the church. This section was known to have been further extended in 1638 by Isabelle Salviati whilst the church was being worked on. The West wing was destroyed in a fire in 1723.The joining edge can be seen on the northwest corner of the tower. The 2 wings and tower enclosed the great courtyard of the Chateau that contains the well. This is covered with a distinctive roof held on stone columns built in 1814 that has become emblematic of the Chateau.
From the courtyard there is a central gate that leads into a more agriculture courtyard surrounded by barns and outbuildings also containing a large circular dove cote. This has been suggested to have been part of the medieval fortifications that was later converted. One of the barns still contains a wine press from 1808.
The 1st floor windows were enlarged and the corridors and interiors modified in the 1780s by the Burgeat family. Later residents, the Stapfer also built, in a ground floor room a place of worship (they were a strongly Protestant family) and there is still a wooden plaque over the fireplace inscribed "Cult Evangelical Protestant".
Whilst predominantly dating from the Renaissance the building has a strongly Medieval feel due to the central tower. The Salviati family did not build the wings in a heavily Renaissance manner, that was becoming very popular at the time due to their wish to play down their Italian background.
The Chateau was listed in 1906, with later listings for the larger environment and sold to the state by Valentine Stapfer in 1933 on the proviso that the building and interiors remain intact. The large library collection was sold in 1931.

Château de Talcy

The Château de Chambord at Chambord, Loir-et-Cher, France, is one of the most recognisable châteaux in the world because of its very distinctive French Renaissance architecture which blends traditional French medieval forms with classical Renaissance structures. The building, which was never completed, was constructed by King Francis I of France.
Chambord is the largest château in the Loire Valley; it was built to serve as a hunting lodge for Francis I, who maintained his royal residences at the Château de Blois and Amboise. The original design of the Château de Chambord is attributed, though with some doubt, to Domenico da Cortona; Leonardo da Vinci may also have been involved.
Chambord was altered considerably during the twenty-eight years of its construction (1519–1547), during which it was overseen on-site by Pierre Nepveu. With the château nearing completion, Francis showed off his enormous symbol of wealth and power by hosting his old archrival, Emperor Charles V, at Chambord.
In 1792, in the wake of the French Revolution, some of the furnishings were sold and timber removed. For a time the building was left abandoned, though in the 19th century some attempts were made at restoration. During the Second World War, art works from the collections of the Louvre and the Château de Compiègne were moved to the Château de Chambord. The château is now open to the public, receiving 700,000 visitors in 2007. Flooding in June 2016 damaged the grounds but not the château itself.
Architecture
Châteaux in the 16th century departed from castle architecture; while they were off-shoots of castles, with features commonly associated with them, they did not have serious defences. Extensive gardens and water features, such as a moat, were common amongst châteaux from this period. Chambord is no exception to this pattern. The layout is reminiscent of a typical castle with a keep, corner towers, and defended by a moat. Built in Renaissance style, the internal layout is an early example of the French and Italian style of grouping rooms into self-contained suites, a departure from the medieval style of corridor rooms. The massive château is composed of a central keep with four immense bastion towers at the corners. The keep also forms part of the front wall of a larger compound with two more large towers. Bases for a possible further two towers are found at the rear, but these were never developed, and remain the same height as the wall. The château features 440 rooms, 282 fireplaces, and 84 staircases. Four rectangular vaulted hallways on each floor form a cross-shape.
The château was never intended to provide any form of defence from enemies; consequently the walls, towers and partial moat are decorative, and even at the time were an anachronism. Some elements of the architecture—open windows, loggia, and a vast outdoor area at the top—borrowed from the Italian Renaissance architecture—are less practical in cold and damp northern France.
The roofscape of Chambord contrasts with the masses of its masonry and has often been compared with the skyline of a town: it shows eleven kinds of towers and three types of chimneys, without symmetry, framed at the corners by the massive towers. The design parallels are north Italian and Leonardesque. Writer Henry James remarked "the towers, cupolas, the gables, the lanterns, the chimneys, look more like the spires of a city than the salient points of a single building."
One of the architectural highlights is the spectacular open double-spiral staircase that is the centrepiece of the château. The two spirals ascend the three floors without ever meeting, illuminated from above by a sort of light house at the highest point of the château. There are suggestions that Leonardo da Vinci may have designed the staircase, but this has not been confirmed. Writer John Evelyn said of the staircase "it is devised with four [sic] entries or ascents, which cross one another, so that though four persons meet, they never come in sight, but by small loopholes, till they land. It consists of 274 steps (as I remember), and is an extraordinary work, but of far greater expense than use or beauty."
The château also features 128 metres of façade, more than 800 sculpted columns and an elaborately decorated roof. When Francis I commissioned the construction of Chambord, he wanted it to look like the skyline of Constantinople.
The château is surrounded by a 52.5-square-kilometre (13,000-acre) wooded park and game reserve maintained with red deer, enclosed by a 31-kilometre (19-mile) wall. The king's plan to divert the Loire to surround the château came about only in a novel; Amadis of Gaul, which Francis had translated. In the novel the château is referred to as the Palace of Firm Isle.
Chambord's towers are atypical of French contemporary design in that they lack turrets and spires. In the opinion of author Tanaka, who suggests Leonardo da Vinci influenced the château's design, they are closer in design to minarets of 15th-century Milan.
The design and architecture of the château inspired William Henry Crossland for his design of what is known as the Founder's building at Royal Holloway, University of London. The Founder's Building features very similar towers and layout but was built using red bricks.
History
Royal ownership
Who designed the Château de Chambord is a matter of controversy. The original design is attributed, though with several doubts, to Domenico da Cortona, whose wooden model for the design survived long enough to be drawn by André Félibien in the 17th century. In the drawings of the model, the main staircase of the keep is shown with two straight, parallel flights of steps separated by a passage and is located in one of the arms of the cross. According to Jean Guillaume, this Italian design was later replaced with the centrally located spiral staircase, which is similar to that at Blois, and a design more compatible with the French preference for spectacular grand staircases. However, "at the same time the result was also a triumph of the centralized layout—itself a wholly Italian element." In 1913 Marcel Reymond suggested that Leonardo da Vinci, a guest of Francis at Clos Lucé near Amboise, was responsible for the original design, which reflects Leonardo's plans for a château at Romorantin for the King's mother, and his interests in central planning and double-spiral staircases; the discussion has not yet concluded, although most scholars now agree that Leonardo was at least responsible for the design of the central staircase.
Archeological findings by Jean-Sylvain Caillou & Dominic Hofbauer have established that the lack of symmetry of some facades derives from an original design, abandoned shortly after the construction began, and which ground plan was organised around the central staircase following a central gyratory symmetry. Such a rotative design has no equivalent in architecture at this period of history, and appears reminiscent of Leonardo Da Vinci's works on hydraulic turbines, or the helicopter. Had it been respected, it is believed that this unique building could have featured the quadruple-spiral open staircase, strangely described by John Evelyn and Andrea Palladio although it was never built.
Regardless of who designed the château, on 6 September 1519 Francis Pombriant was ordered to begin construction of the Château de Chambord. The work was interrupted by the Italian War of 1521–1526, and work was slowed by dwindling royal funds and difficulties in laying the structure's foundations. By 1524, the walls were barely above ground level. Building resumed in September 1526, at which point 1,800 workers were employed building the château. At the time of the death of King Francis I in 1547, the work had cost 444,070 livres.
The château was built to act as a hunting lodge for King Francis I; however, the king spent barely seven weeks there in total, that time consisting of short hunting visits. As the château had been constructed with the purpose of short stays, it was not practical to live in on a longer-term basis. The massive rooms, open windows and high ceilings meant heating was impractical. Similarly, as the château was not surrounded by a village or estate, there was no immediate source of food other than game. This meant that all food had to be brought with the group, typically numbering up to 2,000 people at a time.
As a result of all the above, the château was completely unfurnished during this period. All furniture, wall coverings, eating implements and so forth were brought specifically for each hunting trip, a major logistical exercise. It is for this reason that much furniture from the era was built to be disassembled to facilitate transportation. After Francis died of a heart attack in 1547, the château was not used for almost a century.
For more than 80 years after the death of King Francis I, French kings abandoned the château, allowing it to fall into decay. Finally, in 1639 King Louis XIII gave it to his brother, Gaston d'Orléans, who saved the château from ruin by carrying out much restoration work.
King Louis XIV had the great keep restored and furnished the royal apartments. The king then added a 1,200-horse stable, enabling him to use the château as a hunting lodge and a place to entertain a few weeks each year. Nonetheless, Louis XIV abandoned the château in 1685.
From 1725 to 1733, Stanislas Leszczyński (Stanislas I), the deposed King of Poland and father-in-law of King Louis XV, lived at Chambord. In 1745, as a reward for valour, the king gave the château to Maurice de Saxe, Marshal of France who installed his military regiment there. Maurice de Saxe died in 1750 and once again the colossal château sat empty for many years.
French Revolution and modern history
In 1792, the Revolutionary government ordered the sale of the furnishings; the wall panellings were removed and even floors were taken up and sold for the value of their timber, and, according to M de la Saussaye, the panelled doors were burned to keep the rooms warm during the sales; the empty château was left abandoned until Napoleon Bonaparte gave it to his subordinate, Louis Alexandre Berthier. The château was subsequently purchased from his widow for the infant Duke of Bordeaux, Henri Charles Dieudonné (1820–1883) who took the title Comte de Chambord. A brief attempt at restoration and occupation was made by his grandfather King Charles X (1824–1830) but in 1830 both were exiled. In Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea, published in the 1830s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow remarked on the dilapidation that had set in: "all is mournful and deserted. The grass has overgrown the pavement of the courtyard, and the rude sculpture upon the walls is broken and defaced". During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) the château was used as a field hospital.
The final attempt to make use of the colossus came from the Comte de Chambord but after the Comte died in 1883, the château was left to his sister's heirs, the titular Dukes of Parma, then resident in Austria. First left to Robert, Duke of Parma, who died in 1907 and after him, Elias, Prince of Parma. Any attempts at restoration ended with the onset of World War I in 1914. The Château de Chambord was confiscated as enemy property in 1915, but the family of the Duke of Parma sued to recover it, and that suit was not settled until 1932; restoration work was not begun until a few years after World War II ended in 1945. The Château and surrounding areas, some 5,440 hectares (13,400 acres; 21.0 sq mi), have belonged to the French state since 1930.
In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the art collections of the Louvre and Compiègne museums (including the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo) were stored at the Château de Chambord. An American B-24 Liberator bomber crashed onto the château lawn on 22 June 1944. The image of the château has been widely used to sell commodities from chocolate to alcohol and from porcelain to alarm clocks; combined with the various written accounts of visitors, this made Chambord one of the best known examples of France's architectural history. Today, Chambord is a major tourist attraction, and in 2007 around 700,000 people visited the château.
After unusually heavy rainfall, Chambord was closed to the public from 1 to 6 June 2016. The river Cosson, a tributary of the Loire, flooded its banks and the chateau's moat. Drone photography documented some of the peak flooding. The French Patrimony Foundation described effects of the flooding on Chambord's 13,000-acre property. The 20-mile wall around the chateaux was breached at several points, metal gates were torn from their framing, and roads were damaged. Also, trees were uprooted and certain electrical and fire protection systems were put out of order. However, the chateau itself and its collections reportedly were undamaged. The foundation observed that paradoxically the natural disaster effected Francis I's vision that Chambord appear to rise from the waters as if it were diverting the Loire. Repairs are expected to cost upwards of a quarter-million dollars.
Influence
The Founder's Building at Royal Holloway, University of London, designed by William Henry Crossland, was inspired by the Château de Chambord. The main building of Fettes College in Edinburgh, designed by David Bryce in 1870, also contains decorative quotations from the Château de Chambord.

Château de Chambord

The Château de Menars is a château associated with Madame de Pompadour situated on the bank of the Loire at Menars (Loir-et-Cher) in France.
History
Towards 1646, Guillaume Charron, adviser of the King and general treasurer of extraordinary levies supplying French forces in the Thirty Years War built his chateau on a superb site overlooking the Loire river at Menars. The original construction consisted of a main building and two pavillons. His son, Jean-Jacques Charron, président à mortier of the Parlement de Paris and brother-in-law of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, inherited the estate in 1669. He added two unequal wings to the château and enlarged the demesne, which Louis XIV made a marquisat in 1676.
In 1760, Menars was acquired by Mme de Pompadour, who paid almost 1,000,000 livres in installments and "sold some pearl bracelets to meet the first payment". The king's mistress charged the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel with constructing two new wings on both sides of the two pavilions, which replace those built in the seventeenth century. To break the uniformity of the façade, Gabriel covered these two wings with flat roofs "à l'italienne". On each side of the main courtyard, he built two more pavilions: the Pavilion of the Clock on the right, which contains the kitchens and is connected to the château by a subterranean passageway, and the Pavillon of the Meridian on the left, where the caretaker's lodge is found. He also directed important alteration work on the interior of the building.
With the death of the marquise de Pompadour in 1764, the château passed to her brother, Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, marquis de Marigny, and general director of the Bâtiments du Roi. Some new work was then realized under the direction of architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot: the side court, and the main building were doubled and the ground floor covered à l'italienne, while the wings built by Gabriel were equipped with pitched slate roofs à la française.
After 1830, Joseph, prince de Caraman-Chimay established at the Château de Menars an establishment he called the "prytanée" which aims to bring together young people of different conditions and nationalities to give them a common education. To this effect, he built a vast establishment to the east of the forecourt, which partly survives, as well as a small gas works to provide coal and gas to the college.
Architecture
In spite of the successive additions, the Château de Menars preserves a simplicity of planning and of construction, with a certain austerity reflecting the original spirit of the châteaux of the seventeenth century. The later additions are still perfectly readable, with the central body and its two pavilions between which the parts added by Marigny fit and beyond which the two wings created by Gabriel extend.
The corps de logis on the ground floor presents a large gallery nowadays, created in 1912 by combining three spaces. The main building still presents three large parts - the old hall in the center, room with a dais on the left and salon for company on the right - ornate woodwork designed by Gabriel as well as chimneypieces surmounted with mirrors. The staircase of stone, as well as the unusual dado of mahogany in the library on the first floor, date from the transformations effected by the Marquis de Marigny.
Gardens
Jean-Jacques Cartwright, in the second half of the seventeenth century, arranged a formal garden with parterres, turf boulingrins, a canal with other bodies of water, and two planted avenues "of elms in four rows, one of six hundred toises and the others of four hundred" whence the view contains the Loire and the surrounding countryside.
During Marigny's tenure an English garden was created in the Bois-Bas, with a small ravine located to the west, in which Marigny planted thickets of various diverse trees, sheltering cabinets of trellis-work. One of them contained a famous hydraulic machine, conceived by the mechanic Loriot. At the edge of the Loire, a Désert was arranged in an old sand pit and was decorated as an artificial grotto.
Marigny devoted all his care to the installation of the park for the presentation of its prestigious collection of sculpture. In front of the château, in place of the former parterres, he created a broad terrace. He remade the gardens in the style of his day while commissioning many garden follies.
At the foot of the château, the "Rotunda of Abundance", built by Soufflot, permits passage from the basement of the château to the interior of the orangery. It originally housed a statue of Abundance by Lambert-Sigisbert Adam the elder, which was replaced with a Louis XV by Nicolas Coustou, which has now been replaced by a copy of Medici Venus by Jean-Jacques Clérion.
Towards the east, the terrace ends in a roundabout where Marigny built a kiosk in the Chinese manner designed by Charles De Wailly. Between the terrace and the road, are ordered a series of hedges, trellises, outdoor rooms of greenery as well as a kitchen garden. Below, around a small fountain, Soufflot created a magnificent nymphaeum with Serlian windows on the façade and, inside, the use of the Doric order reveals an Italianate inspiration.

Château de Menars

Le château de la Ferté est un château français situé à La Ferté-Saint-Aubin, dans le département du Loiret, en région Centre-Val de Loire.
La demeure, toute entourée de douves, s’élève sur les bords de la rivière du Cosson. Le château et son parc sont partiellement classés et partiellement inscrits au titre des Monuments historiques par plusieurs arrêtés successifs, les 28 février 1944, 29 juillet 1961 et 7 mars 1995.
Géographie
Le château est situé à 22 km au sud d'Orléans, 14 km au nord de Lamotte-Beuvron et 38 km au nord-est du château de Chambord, en bordure de la route départementale 2020, à la sortie nord de la commune de La Ferté-Saint-Aubin, dans la région naturelle de Sologne.
Le site est desservi par la gare de La Ferté-Saint-Aubin de la ligne des Aubrais - Orléans à Montauban-Ville-Bourbon et la ligne 5 du réseau d'autocars Ulys.
Historique
La construction du château débute à la fin du xvie sur ordre d'Henri de Saint-Nectaire selon les plans de l'architecte Théodore Lefèvre. Elle se poursuit sous le règne de son fils, Henri de La Ferté-Senneterre.
Le maréchal Ulrich Frédéric Woldemar de Löwendal l'acquiert en 1748 ; il est confisqué à son fils lors de la Révolution française.
François Victor Masséna, fils du maréchal d'Empire, rachète le château en 1827.
Jacques Guyot acquiert le château en 1987 et l'ouvre au public pour notamment financer les travaux de rénovation.
Description
Le château, entouré de douves, est constitué du petit château, dans la partie gauche du corps de logis actuel, construit entre 1590 et 1620 et du grand logis (ou grand château) et ses deux pavillons qui en encadrent l'entrée datant du xviie.
Le parc, de 40 hectares, a été aménagé en jardin à la française dès les années 1630 puis modifié en parc paysager à partir de 1822. En 1992, le jardin est réagencé tel qu'il était au xviiie siècle. Il comporte sept bras d'eau, dont les eaux du Cosson. On y trouve des charmilles, des cyprès chauves ainsi qu'un araucaria.
Les écuries du château datent du xixe siècle.
Dans le grand château, on retrouve un hall d'entrée orné d'une Diane et d'une Vénus d'Arles, un grand salon et un bureau qui précède la chambre de la comtesse O'Gorman, une vaste salle à manger, ainsi que les cuisines du château, situées au sous sol.
L'orangerie a été aménagée en salle de réception.
Manifestations
Le château est le cadre de plusieurs manifestations :
Pâques au château : grande courses aux œufs pour petits et grands ;
Cuisine au château : semaine de la Toussaint, animation autour de la gastronomie ;
les journées du patrimoine, fin septembre ;
Noël au château, les trois premiers week-end de décembre et vacances de Noël, décorations, ateliers, spectacles.
Filmographie
Le film La Règle du jeu réalisé en 1939 par Jean Renoir fut tourné au château de la Ferté.
Le château a servi de décor à l'émission La Fabuleuse Histoire du restaurant, présentée par Stéphane Bern et diffusée en 2018.

Château de la Ferté

Francois II had always been sickly unfortunately in 1560 he came ill after hunting from from what was originally thought to be an ear infection. Francois was kept was at the Hotel Groslot, Renaissance mansion built a few years before by a local man called Jacques Groslot. Sadly, the young king´s condition grew steadily worse and by December, a month after he fell ill he was suffering seizures and had lost the ability to speak. By the 5th of December he was dead.
Poor Mary set sail for home.
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