Château de Clagny

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The Château de Clagny was a French country house that stood northeast of the Château de Versailles; it was designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart for Madame de Montespan between 1674 and 1680. Although among the most important of the private residences designed by this great architect, it was destroyed less than a century later. Its appearance can only be traced through the engravings made of it, and scattered references in the archives of the Bâtiments du Roi.[1]

Louis XIV had bought the domaine of Clagny from the Hôpital des Incurables of Paris in 1665. On 22 May 1674 Colbert’s son submitted to him a plan designed by the young Mansart, who had built Vaux-le-Vicomte for Louis' disgraced minister, Nicolas Fouquet. The king deferred to Mme de Montespan's judgment, but by 12 June work was ordered to be begun at once, Mme de Montespan being anxious to start planting the grounds that very fall. André Le Nôtre was to lay out the grounds. In August 1675, Madame de Sévigné visited Clagny, which she described to her daughter:

“We have been at Clagny, and what shall I tell you about it? It is a palace of Armida;[2] the building rises à vue d’oeil,[3] the gardens are already made. You know what Le Nôtre is. He has left standing a little dark wood which is very nice; and next comes a little wood of oranges in great tubs: you can stroll in this wood, which has shady avenues, and there are hedges on both sides cut breast-high, so as to conceal the tubs, and these are full of tuberoses, roses, jasmine, and pinks. This novelty is certainly the prettiest, most surprising and ravishing that one could imagine, and the little wood is greatly liked.”

The orangery where the "little wood of oranges" wintered at Clagny was a showpiece itself, paved with marble. In the gardens cabinets de verdure shaped into niches that held sculptures were clipped into the dense woods, fitted with trelliswork dadoes to fill in their sparse bases.

Mme de Montespan had her portrait painted by Henri Gascard, reclining on a baroque canopied couch, its curtains held up by carved cupids, with the barrel-vaulted Gallery of Clagny visible behind her— as grand a piece of architecture as any the King himself could yet lay claim to. About 1680 Adam-Frans van der Meulen painted a landscape view, of a Promenade en calèche with Louis XIV, the Queen, madame de Montespan, and the Grand Dauphin and his Dauphine, which includes in a single coup d'oeil Versailles and Clagny, showing how closely the two châteaux were sited.[4]

The marquise de Montespan became compromised in the affair of the poisons, then, abandoned by the King for Mme de Maintenon[5], she occupied the house less and less, though in 1685 he formally made it over as a gift to her, partly for the sake of their natural son, his beloved duc du Maine. In June 1692 she left everything to her son and entered a nunnery. At her death in 1707, the duc du Maine inherited Clagny, followed in time by his grandson, the prince de Dombes, last of his line: the château reverted to the Crown in 1766.

By then the château, which Mme de Sévigné estimated to have cost not less than two million livres,[6] and to have kept 1200 workers occupied, suffered from years of neglect, virtually unoccupied for forty years, and from the dampness of its situation. The "quartier nouveau" of the town of Versailles had expanded to the edge of the domain of Clagny, nestling in the northern corner between the château and the étang de Clagny, the pond in its park. In 1734, following an episode of "fièvre paludéenne", possibly malaria, in the quartier Notre-Dame of Versailles, it was decided to drain the pond and then to fill it in (1736).

When Clagny reverted to his use, Louis XV alienated some eleven hectares at the edge of the domain and presented them to his Queen, for the convent she built, to designs by Richard Mique. The château was slated for demolition in 1769[7] Some of its dressed stone was employed in constructing the Couvent des Ursulines (built 1767-72 to designs of Richard Mique) and other stone found its way into the hôtels particuliers along the new boulevard de la Reine, struck though the park in 1772. The park was further subdivided under the Second Empire.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Brought together by Charles Harlay, 1913. Le Château de Clagny à Versailles : Restitution - Notices - Iconographiques (Versailles: Editions Artistiques et Scientifiques).
  2. ^ Mme de Sévigné is referred to the phantasmagorical palace conjured by the sorceress Armida to entrap Rinaldo, in Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata.
  3. ^ "Under one's very eyes".
  4. ^ Musée de Versailles.
  5. ^ They were clandestinely married in 1683, the year of the Queen's death.
  6. ^ A modern inclusive estimate amounts to seventeen millions
  7. ^ the painter P.A. de Machy showed in the Paris Salons of 1773-1775 and 1785, paintings (untraced) showing the demolition (ref. Simon)


[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Bonnassieux, Louis Jean Pierre, 2002. Le château de Clagny et madame de Montespan: D'après les documents originaux. Histoire d'un quartier de Versailles
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