Château de Choisy

The Château de Choisy was a sometime royal French residence in the commune of Choisy-le-Roi in the Val-de-Marne department, not far from Paris. The commune was given its present name by Louis XV, when he purchased the manor of Choisy and its château in October 1739.

The site had been purchased well before 1680 by Louis XIV's first cousin Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, "La Grande Mademoiselle". She laid out 40,000 livres for the property, and swept away an existing corps de logis, according to her Mémoires, and had a new house built to plans of Jacques Gabriel—"who made my house to my fashion" Mlle Montpensier noted, "without any ornament or 'architecture'" an assertion that overlooked sculptural enrichments in the pediment, by Étienne Le Hongre.

The Château de Choisy was set in an elaborate series of gardens laid out by André Le Nôtre. He was called in before the few existing buildings were swept away and found the site too closed in by dense woodlands: "There one only saw the riverbank as if through a dormer window," he told the king—who passed on the remark— and advised Mlle de Montpensier to begin in this "vilaine situation" by "laying low all the woods that were there". The view of the river was the main thing, and Mlle de Montpensier calculated it to advantage: "As I had my house built in order to go there in summer, I took measures in order that one might see the river in the time of year when it is at its lowest; from my bed I see it and all the boats that pass."

The lost château is known today through engravings by Pierre-Jean Mariette, Gabriel Perelle and Pierre Aveline. Its interiors were well described in the Grande Mademoiselle's Mémoires.

The château passed in 1693 to le Grand Dauphin, who had some interior modifications executed (Kimball 1943 p 51) before exchanging it in 1695 for Meudon, more accessible from Versailles.

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Wikipedia