Château de Chenonceau, France

Château de Chenonceau, France - jigsaw

The Château de Chenonceau in Loire Valley, France, is known as the Ladies Castle.

Thomas Bohier and his wife Catherine Briçonnet built the Château from 1513-1517. 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 1955. That year, Diane de Poitiers commissioned master mason Philibert de l’Orme (1514-1570) to build the arched bridge joining the castle to the opposite bank where the gardens were located.

In 1559, Queen Catherine de Medici, widow of Henry II, quickly deposed Diane de Poitiers and announced that her own son would be the next king – King Henri III. Catherine de Medici’s 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 also lived in the Chenonceau Château.

Being privately owned – thanks to Henry II in 1555 – the Château Chenonceau was saved, 200 years later, from the French Revolution (1789-1799).

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. On his death, his brother Gaston transformed the Château de Chenonceau into a military hospital during the Great War.

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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