The history of the Château de Chenonceau – the Chenonceau Castle in Loire Valley, France – is defined by an almost uninterrupted succession of women who built, embellished, protected, restored, and saved it.
The Château was built from 1513-1517 by Thomas Bohier and (above all) his wife Catherine Briçonnet. In 1535, the King of France, Francois I, took the castle as part of a debt settlement. But it didn’t stay with the French Crown for long because the next King of France, Henri II, gave it, not to his wife, the Queen, but to his favourite lady, Diane de Poitiers, “in full right of ownership, seisin and possession, completely, peacefully and perpetually, to dispose of as her own and true patrimony.” This artificial exit of Château Chenonceau into private hands meant that it was saved, 200 years later, from the French Revolution.
In 1559, Queen Catherine de Medici, widow of Henry II, quickly deposed Diane de Poitiers and made her own son king – King Henri III – but Catherine managed the Kingdom of France from her study, the Green Cabinet in the Château de Chenonceau. Her daughter-in-law, Louise de Lorraine, wife of King Henry III, inherited the castle in 1589 when Catherine died and Henri was assassinated in the same year. Louise de Lorraine owned it for 11 years.
From 1601 to 1733, men owned the castle, and in 1733 Claude Dupin bought the castle which his wife Louise Dupin inherited when he died. She was called the Lady of the Enlightenment and was the first to draft a Code of Women’s Rights with the assistance of her secretary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was very happy at Chenonceau and became a noted literary author and composer.
The last of the Ladies of the Castle was Madame Pelouze. She bought it in 1864. Being rather wealthy, she renovated it. Henri Menier purchased the castle in 1913, who opened it to visitors and heads of state. The U.S. President Harry Truman visited the Château on his first trip to France in 1945. On Henri Menier’s death, his brother Gaston transformed the Château de Chenonceau into a military hospital during the Great War.
Château de Chenonceau has an extraordinary collection of furniture, tapestries and paintings: Rubens, Primaticcio, Tintoretto, Corregio, Van Loo, Murillo, Clouet, Sassoferrato, Andrea del Sarto, Ribalta, Nattier, Veronese, Poussin, Van Dyck, Bassano, Zurbaran, and the 15th-century Florentine sculptor Mino da Fiesole. These masterpieces by European painters of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, reflect the history of the castle and the leading role of women in its history.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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