Château du Plessis-Bourré

In the fourteenth century the estate then called the Plessis-le-Vent belonged to Roberte de La Haye and her husband Geoffroy III des Roches, châtelain of Longué and lord of Jarzé and of La Faigne. It followed the fortunes of the châtellenie of Longué and the lordship of Jarzé, passing in the fifteenth century to the Sainte-Maure de Montgauger, and Charles I de Sainte-Maure, created first count of Nesle in 1466, sold the whole of it on. The buyer was Jean Bourré (1424–1506), treasurer to Louis XI and the king's closest confidant, who took the domain of the Plessis-le-Vent on 26 November 1462 and gathered in the châtellenie of Longué and the lordship of Jarzé by stages between 1461 and 1473.

On the old manor Bourré built the present château between 1468 and 1473. He was frequently away, and it was his wife, Marguerite de Feschal, who kept watch over the work, following its progress from the château de Vaux. What went up was a fortress and a house of pleasure at once: a bridge forty-four metres long across broad moats, a double drawbridge, a keep and a wall-walk, with the water held three metres clear of the masonry so that a terrace ran the whole way round the building for gunners to take position on.

Two kings of France came to the château in the fifteenth century. Louis XI arrived on 17 April 1473, while on pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Béhuard, and Charles VIII on 10 June 1487, with his elder sister Anne de Beaujeu, then regent of the kingdom.

Bourré's youngest son, Charles Bourré "le Jeune" (1483–1534), was chamberlain to the king and lord of Vaux and of Beaumont, and it was his descendants who carried the château forward. By the marriage in 1572 of his granddaughter Renée Bourré to René du Plessis, the house passed to the du Plessis de la Roche-Pichemer, later the du Plessis de Jarzé, counts of Plessis-Bourré and marquises of Jarzé.

The best remembered of them was René du Plessis (1613–1676), called "le Beau Jarzé" and attached to the Grand Condé, son of François du Plessis de Jarzé (1588–1642), who had married Catherine de Beaumanoir-Lavardin in 1612. René and his wife Catherine Amy, who died in 1675, were the parents of Urbain-Charles, married in 1663 to Marie-Louise de Saint-Offange de La Pouëze and dead before his father in June 1672. Urbain-Charles's son Marie-Urbain-René (1664–1723) went by the name "Bras d'argent", having lost an arm at Philippsburg in 1688; he left no children by his wife Anne-Thérèse de Goury.

The Plessis-Bourré and the marquisate of Jarzé passed next to Camille Savary de Brèves (1663–1732), grandson of the Camille Savary de Brèves who had married Catherine du Plessis-Jarzé, sister of "le Beau Jarzé", in 1634. The Savary de Brèves began breaking up the holding in 1730, and the marquisate of Jarzé was liquidated with the rest of it. On 18 November 1751 the château and its domain were bought for 195,000 livres by Marie Pissonnet de Bellefonds, widow of René-Pierre de La Planche de Ruillé, whom she had married in 1738. Their son Jean-Guillaume, comte de Ruillé, born in 1739, sat as a deputy of the nobility at the Estates General and was put to death by revolutionaries from Angers in January 1794. His son-in-law Jean-Joseph de Terves died in the château on 19 October 1835.

The house they lived in kept one awkward feature. The coffered ceiling of the guard room carries twenty-four painted panels by an unknown hand, sixteen of them working the symbolism of the alchemists of the day, above all the three active principles of mercury, sulphur and salt, the remaining eight proverbial scenes of a bold and mischievous cast; their boldness was such that in the eighteenth century they were screened from the eyes of guests.

By 1850 the château was on the market and nobody would take it, and there was a real prospect of its being broken up as a tuffeau quarry. Victor Avenant, a notary at Angers who wanted the site preserved, bought it in 1851 for 500,000 francs, with a domain that still ran to 440 hectares, 88 of them woodland, after generations of sales and partitions. In 1911 it was bought by Henri Vaïsse, nephew of Claude-Marius Vaïsse, prefect and senator of the Rhône under the Second Empire and known as the "Haussmann lyonnais".

The château, together with its ornamental water, its moats and its avenues, was classified a monument historique by a decree of 1 June 1931. In 1945 the hermetist Eugène Canseliet published Deux logis alchimiques, a continuation of Fulcanelli's Demeures philosophales, arguing that the Plessis-Bourré is decorated with alchemical and esoteric symbols. No historical evidence supports the reading, and the notion that buildings and works of art carry alchemical meaning is itself no older than the seventeenth century.

Henri Vaïsse died in 1956 and left the château to his nephew François Reille-Soult, Duke of Dalmatia and deputy for the Tarn, a descendant of Marshal Reille (1775–1860) and, in the female line, of the imperial marshals Soult and Masséna. He opened the house to the public and laid out the route by which it is visited.

In 1978 his granddaughter Antoinette, born de Croix and daughter of Marie Andrée Reille-Soult de Dalmatie, and her husband Bruno de Ferrières de Sauvebœuf took over the château and its lands, heading the restoration and upkeep until 2009. They brought up three children in the house, Victor, Matthias and Jean-Baptiste, and their thirty-one years there were the longest stay by a single family since 1473. The property has been run since 1985 by the Société civile immobilière du Plessis-Bourré, whose managers are Jean-François Reille-Soult de Dalmatie and Aymeric d'Anthenaise, himself descended from the family, and since 2010 the château has been lived in by descendants of François Reille-Soult. Its moated outline has carried film after film, from Jacques Demy's Peau d'Âne to Bertrand Tavernier's The Princess of Montpensier.