Château de Trécesson

Trécesson is named as the residence of the lords of Ploërmel and Campénéac as early as the 8th century, though the beginnings of the castle itself are not recoverable. The family that gave the place its name is documented from the 13th century, and its first known representative is the knight Jean de Trécesson, whose arms — gules, three chevrons ermine — are recorded in 1250; the family motto was Plutôt rompre que plier, rather break than bend. His grandson held the office of Constable of Brittany in the 14th century.

Tradition attributes the building of the castle to the end of the 14th century and names a Jean de Trécesson, chamberlain to Duke Jean IV of Brittany, as the man who raised it. The château in its present position is more probably a work of the very end of the 14th century or of the 15th.

Around 1440 the last heiress of the name, Jeanne de Trécesson, married Éon de Carné. He and his son François took the name and arms of Trécesson for their own and undertook the transformation and rebuilding of the château. A small seigneurial chapel of the 15th century stands off the trapezoidal courtyard, and a vaulted room in the hexagonal corner tower, built into the old étuve, was painted with the Loves of Rinaldo and Armida.

The fief was raised to a county in 1681. The house remained the property of the Carné-Trécesson until 1773, when the last to carry the name, Agathe de Trécesson, married René-Joseph Le Preste, comte de Châteaugiron, who became its owner.

Several legends attach to the castle: a headless priest said to walk the meadows around the castle, by the calvary on the road, the ghost card players, and the tale of the manoir du Pied d'Ânon. The best known is that of the Dame blanche, related in an 1824 volume of the review Le Lycée armoricain; the events are placed between 1740 and 1760.

A poacher lying in wait in the park by night hears a carriage drawn by two black horses draw slowly up. Men with spades and picks dig a grave at the foot of his tree while two gentlemen pull from the coach a young woman richly dressed in white silk, a bouquet in her hand and flowers in her hair — a bride. She begs her brothers for her life; they answer that she has dishonoured the family and is no longer part of it, and she is thrown into the pit and buried alive. The poacher dares not intervene and goes home to tell his wife, who berates him for his cowardice; the two of them rouse M. de Trécesson from his bed. By the time his people reach the spot the day is breaking, and when the grave is opened the young woman gives one long sigh and dies.

The lord of Trécesson had her buried with honours and hung the wedding gown, the bouquet and the crown of flowers in the castle chapel, where they are said to have remained until the Revolution. Clément Rochel traced the story back to 1260, when Artus de Trécesson-Campénéac, home from a campaign against the English under the banner of Duke Jean II, sought the hand of Jeanne-la-Crollée, aged twenty, the daughter of his cousin Conrad de Coatleven; she vanished on her wedding day in her wedding clothes, and Artus died of grief some years later. The white lady is said to appear on the roofs at full moon, though no direct testimony of her is known, and Armand du Chatellier, in his family archives, attests the presence of the gown in 1881.

The ghost card players belong to one room in particular, a chamber on the second floor at the end of a corridor, held to be haunted. A guest who said he would sleep there to test his courage found sleep impossible; towards midnight he watched two valets and then two card-playing gentlemen settle at a gaming table in the room, one of them brandishing a weapon. He slept at last, and next morning found a heap of gold on the table. He and the lord of Trécesson quarrelled over the find, the matter going as far as an imaginary suit before the Parlement of Brittany. The Flemish painter Theodore Rombouts is credited with an oil of the ghost card players of Trécesson.

The tale of the manoir du Pied d'Ânon, dated to about 1910, is another gambling story. The marquis de Trécesson goes to Versailles, gives himself to his passion for play, and loses the whole of his possessions — the castle, the domain and the farms. Convinced that nothing is left him, he is on the point of blowing his brains out when his valet de chambre tells him there remains the manoir du Pied d'Ânon: in truth a wretched wooden hut clinging to a rock, so slight a thing that the marquis had forgotten it. He stakes the Pied d'Ânon, wins, and recovers everything he had lost.

In 1793 Le Preste sold Trécesson to Nicolas Bourelle de Sivry, paymaster general of the armies. In June of the same year the Girondin deputy Jacques Defermon (1752–1831), known as Defermon des Chapelières, having signed a protest against the exclusion of the Gironde, was obliged to flee and took refuge in the château. He remained hidden there through the Terror, for eighteen months, into 1794.

Under the Restoration, between 1814 and 1830, the estate served as the agricultural school of the department.

The domain passed by inheritance to the Perrien de Crenan, then to the Montesquieu, and finally to the Prunelé through the marriage on 17 January 1917 of Antoine de Prunelé to Catherine de Perrien de Crenan. Trécesson was classified as a monument historique in June 1922, its grounds inscribed in September 2012, and the classification extended to the castle's immediate surroundings in 2014.

The Prunelé sold the château in April 2022. It stands on private land near the forest of Paimpont-Brocéliande and on the edge of the Coëtquidan military camp, and can be visited in part.