Château du Lude

The site sits on the Loir at the meeting of Maine, Anjou and Touraine. It was occupied from the Middle Ages and became a strategic point. The first fortress here is placed at the end of the ninth century, though it has also been dated to the tenth or eleventh: after the first Viking raids into Anjou between 853 and 873, the local lords began building strongholds to protect their lands, and at Le Lude they raised the fort de la Motte, about a hundred metres north of the present castle on the left bank of the river. That first work was no more than a motte carrying a keep.

In 1027 Alain of Brittany besieged Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, in the castle of Le Lude, the castellum lusdii, to punish him for the treatment of his ally Herbert Éveille-Chien, count of Maine. Fulk did not have the troops to sustain a fight and submitted at once, giving back the lands and the hostages he had extracted from Herbert two years earlier at a meeting at Saintes.

Towards the end of the thirteenth century the footings of a masonry fortress were laid further south, on the site of the castle that stands today, and building went on there from the thirteenth century into the fifteenth. On the eve of the Hundred Years War heavy resources went into the defences: the moats were dug, and a spur and ramparts were raised on the bank of the Loir.

At the time of the battle of Pontvallain in 1370, English troops under Robert Knolles twice attempted to take Le Lude and were twice driven off, the castle being defended by its captain, Guillaume Méron.

After the defeat of the French army at Verneuil in 1424 the English completed their conquest of Maine, and in the autumn of 1425 they took the castle of Le Lude under the orders of the earl of Warwick. The English occupation lasted only two years. At the end of 1427 French troops commanded by Ambroise de Loré, with Gilles de Rais and Jean de Bueil, retook Le Lude after a siege of several days.

Jean de Daillon, of a Poitevin family and a childhood friend of Louis XI, whose chamberlain he became, acquired the castle in 1457. Restored to the king's favour in 1468, he called in Jean Gendrot, architect to King René of Anjou, to survey the damage the fortress had taken during the Hundred Years War and to settle what should be rebuilt.

Gendrot came to Le Lude in 1479 to run the works and settled in a house beside the castle, since called the maison des Architectes and itself inscribed as a monument historique. He brought a large workforce with him and had houses built for them along the street now known as the rue de la Gendrottière. He renovated the old castle throughout and turned it into a house of pleasure in the Renaissance manner, a programme that ran on for close to half a century. The south-east front, called the François I façade, was finished between 1520 and 1530; its mullioned windows are framed by pilasters and finely carved pediments in the Italian Renaissance style, and porcupines, the emblem of Louis XII, sit between the arches as a mark of when the work was done. Jean de Daillon died before the building was complete, and his son Jacques took the project through to its end. In May 1545 François I raised the barony of Le Lude into a county.

The castle received a run of notable guests. Henri IV was there in 1598 for the Corpus Christi celebrations, his first procession since his conversion to Catholicism, and Louis XIII came in 1619. The Daillon descendants all worked at improving the house, and the horseshoe-shaped courtyard dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century, in a style of transition at the close of the French Renaissance.

In 1675 the lands of Le Lude were erected into a duchy and peerage by letters given at Versailles, and Henry de Daillon, lieutenant-general of the king's armies, became the first duc du Lude. He struck up a friendship with the marquise de Sévigné, whom he received at the castle. He died without an heir in 1685 and left the place to his nephew Antoine Gaston de Roquelaure, marshal of France; it passed by inheritance to the ducs de Rohan, who sold it in 1751.

The buyer in 1751 was Joseph Julien Duvelaër, of a family of Dutch corsairs settled at Saint-Malo and a member of the Compagnie des Indes. He died without children in 1785 and left the castle to his niece Françoise Butler, who had become marquise de La Vieuville by her marriage in 1758 to Étienne Auguste Baude de La Vieuville. In 1787 she had the classical Louis XVI range built to plans by the architect Jean-Benoît-Vincent Barré, facing the spur that commands the Loir, a front that turned the orientation of the whole castle through 180 degrees. The castle was put under sequestration during the Revolution, and she managed to keep the ownership of it. Her daughter Élisabeth married Louis Céleste de Talhouët-Bonamour, marquis de Talhouët, and on the marquise's death the castle passed to the Talhouëts, a Breton family whose members held high public office: Frédéric de Talhouët, Élisabeth's son, was made a grand officer of the Legion of Honour and became president of the general council of the Sarthe, and his heir the marquis Auguste de Talhouët-Roy was mayor of Le Lude, deputy and then senator for the Sarthe, and minister of public works in 1870.

It was Auguste who launched, from the middle of the nineteenth century, a long restoration campaign that drew in four architects: Pierre-Félix Delarue, Henri Darcy, Louis Parent and Alain Lafargue. The work began in 1853 with the paintings of the old oratory in the south-west tower, a sixteenth-century painted cabinet made for the duchesse du Lude by the school of Raphael and a rare example of an Italian studiolo in a French castle, which had been hidden under a false plaster ceiling shortly before the Revolution and was found again in that year. The north-west tower, fitted out with a guard room, a library and a state staircase, was rebuilt between 1854 and 1855, and the north front facing the town was restored by Delarue in the neo-gothic style. The Renaissance façade was repaired without its composition being altered. The marquis and after him his son René carried the improvements on until the eve of the First World War. In the vestibule stands an old copy of the bronze known as the Ange du Lude, cast by the king's gunner Jean Barbet at Lyon in 1475 as a weathervane for the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and brought to the castle by the marquis de Talhouët in the nineteenth century; the original was bought early in the twentieth century by the American financier and collector John Pierpont Morgan.

The François I façade and the oratory were classified as historical monuments in 1928. The castle stayed with the Talhouëts until the death in 1948 of René de Talhouët, who had been mayor of the commune for fifty-six years, and passed to his grandson René de Nicolaÿ; it was at the urging of the latter's widow, born Princess Pia-Maria of Orléans-Bragance, that one of the first son et lumière shows in France was created here in 1958, and it carried the name of Le Lude until its last performance in 1995. By an order of 28 October 1992 the castle, its spur-and-moat defensive system, the masonry and balustrades of the terraces, the enclosure walls of the park and the whole of the outbuildings were inscribed as historical monuments, and the hydraulic tympanum that feeds the irrigation canals was classified by an order in 2022. Le Lude is now the property of Louis-Jean de Nicolaÿ and his wife Barbara, who founded the Fête des Jardiniers in 1994, at which the Prix P.-J. Redouté for garden and botanical books is awarded; the gardens hold the Ministry of Culture's Jardin remarquable label.