Blérancourt

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Blérancourt is a commune of the Aisne département, in France.

The Château de Blérancourt, an immensely influential design by Salomon de Brosse, houses the National Museum of French-American Friendship and Cooperation, founded by Anne Morgan, daughter of the financier J. Pierpont Morgan (due to reopen in 2007). The corps de logis of the château no longer exists, but de Brosse's twin cubical stone pavilions and a grand entrance gateway approached by a stone bridge across a moat (now dry) survive. The pavilions have identical façades on all sides, framed in rusticated quoins at the corners: each consists of a pair of pedimented windows that make a composition with a central oeil de boeuf window under a hemicyclical arch that carries the dentilled cornice across and breaks into the roof balustrading above. Slate roofs with cyma curves converge to a central four-sided cap. The central gateway takes the form of a triumphal arch with a prominent keystone.

The house of Louis de Saint-Just now houses a museum devoted to the French Revolution.

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