Castle of Menars

The Castle of Menars (French: château de Menars, pronounced [ʃɑto də menaʁ]) is a castle (château) associated with Madame de Pompadour situated on the bank of the river Loire in Menars, Loir-et-Cher, France.

Towards 1646, Guillaume Charron, adviser of the King and general treasurer of extraordinary levies supplying French forces in the Thirty Years' War built his château on a superb site overlooking the river Loire at Menars. The original construction consisted of a main building and two pavilions. 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 1725, it was given to Queen Marie Leszczyńska's parents, the deposed King and Queen of Poland, by Louis XV as one of their residences which they alternated with the Chateau de Chambord, until they left for the newly acquired Duchy of Lorraine in 1736.

In 1760, Menars was acquired by Madame 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.

Text adapted from “Château de Menars” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Castle of Menars ranks #1,104 of 7,738 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #91 of the 469 mapped in France. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 4,844 times in the last 60 days, more than 84% of the atlas. 9 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Blois, 8 km away. It is one of the 58 landmarks on the atlas's regional map of the Loire Valley. See how France compares in the castle statistics.

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