Château de Champs-sur-Marne

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The Château de Champs-sur-Marne

The Château de Champs, at Champs-sur-Marne was built in its present form for the treasurer Charles Renouard de la Touane in 1699 by Pierre Bullet, architecte du roi. After the first proprietor's bankruptcy, another financier, Paul Poisson de Bourvalais, took up the project. Jean-Baptiste Bullet de Chamblain, the son of Pierre Bullet, finished Champs in 1706.

Ten years later, Paul Poisson was in the Bastille on charges of embezzlement and the château, seized by the Crown, was presented in 1718 to the princesse de Conti, natural daughter of Louis XIV and Louise de la Vallière. That same year, however, she cancelled a debt by making over Champs to her cousin, the future duc de la Vallière, who was responsible for the Rococo salon chinois.

In 1747,^[1] Champs received its most famous resident, Mme de Pompadour for a brief time, during which, however, she spent 200,000 livres in a matter of three years^[2], carrying out works that were probably designed by her personal architect Jean Cailleteau Lassurance, before, with the building of Bellevue, she tired of it and rented it back to the duc de la Vallière, who received the Encyclopédistes at Champs: Diderot, d'Alembert, Voltaire. In 1820, Armand Santerre, nephew of the Revolutionary General Antoine Joseph Santerre, bought the park Saint Martin surrounding the chateau. In 1855 his brother Ernest Santerre bought the chateau. Later, it was finally sold to comte Louis Cahen d'Anvers in 1895, who thoroughly restored it, installing boiseries designed by Germain Boffrand that had been removed from the Hôtel de Mayenne, Paris,^[3] and recreated its parterre gardens in the hands of Achille Duchêne. Marcel Proust was among the guests in this era at Champs. His son Charles Cahen d'Anvers made a gift of it to the state in 1935.

The residence was modernised in 1959 to ready it for visiting heads of state of the French Union. In 1974 it was opened to the public and ceased its official capacity. It has served as a location for many films since then,^[4] while the Monuments Historiques employ some outbuildings as research facilities.

The château looks onto a grand parterre with two basins and an extended central axis that sweeps down all the way to the Marne, laid out about 1710 by Claude Desgotz, the nephew and pupil of André Le Nôtre; it is surrounded by a landscape park laid out in the nineteenth century in the English fashion. The storm of 26 December 1999 did a great deal of damage to mature woodland in the park.

[edit] Notes

^ Kimball gives the date 1747 in The Creation of the Rococo p 194. The date 1757, which is often seen, would make of Champs a rival rather than a precursor of Bellevue.
^ Kimball, p 194, noting her will. The chief surviving interior is the Chambre à Coucher (Kimball fig. 257).
^ Kimball 1943:98-99.
^ Notably Dangerous Liaisons (1988), which received an Oscar for decor.