Château de Menars

The Château de Menars is a château associated with Madame de Pompadour situated on the bank of the Loire at Menars (Loir-et-Cher) in France.

Towards 1646, Guillaume Charron, adviser of the King and general treasurer of extraordinary levies supplying French forces in the Thirty Years War built his chateau on a superb site overlooking the Loire river at Menars. The original construction consisted of a main building and two pavillons. His son, Jean-Jacques Charron, président à mortier of the Parlement de Paris and brother-in-law of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, inherited the estate in 1669. He added two unequal wings to the château and enlarged the demesne, which Louis XIV made a marquisat in 1676.

In 1760, Menars was acquired by Mme de Pompadour, who paid almost 1,000,000 livres in installments and "sold some pearl bracelets to meet the first payment". The king's mistress charged the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel with constructing two new wings on both sides of the two pavilions, which replace those built in the seventeenth century. To break the uniformity of the façade, Gabriel covered these two wings with flat roofs "à l'italienne". On each side of the main courtyard, he built two more pavilions: the Pavilion of the Clock on the right, which contains the kitchens and is connected to the château by a subterranean passageway, and the Pavillon of the Meridian on the left, where the caretaker's lodge is found. He also directed important alteration work on the interior of the building.

With the death of the marquise de Pompadour in 1764, the château passed to her brother, Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, marquis de Marigny, and general director of the Bâtiments du Roi. Some new work was then realized under the direction of architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot: the side court, and the main building were doubled and the ground floor covered à l'italienne, while the wings built by Gabriel were equipped with pitched slate roofs à la française.

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