BEYOND IMAGINATION
If only walls could speak, this Louis XVI style château built in 1750 by shipowners from Nantes, would tell many tales: how it witnessed the French revolution first-hand; how, for a decade, it welcomed tourists as a bed and breakfast; and how a Dutch couple fell in love with it.
STORIED PAST
The chateau is located by the Erdre river, a 10-minute drive from Nantes in western France. Francois I of France used to say that the Erdre was the most beautifulXVI style. The 1.4-hectare ground is encircled by four small pavilions, two of them originally an orangery and an old servant’s house. The garden’s big cedar trees were planted at the end of the 18th century when a relative of the first owners brought them to Europe from Louisiana, USA. Between the garden and the Erdre is a private pond full of fish, which was object to envy and juridical chicane during the revolution. During a fishing trip in 1790, the first owner of the chateau, the Tiby family, was held up by five armed men, claiming that the sole rights to fishing in the river Erdre still belonged to the nobleman Louis-Francois Charette, owner of the neighbouring chateau, as they did before the revolution. A year later Charette escaped to Brussels but was dragged back and imprisoned in Paris where he, along with many other noblemen, lost his head to the guillotine.
