History of the Château de La Motte-Feuilly and its families

Christophe Charlier, the proprietor of the Château de La Motte-Feuilly, will be publishing a book later in 2024 about the château, its architecture and the many fascinating personalities whose lives have graced its history.  Please write to info@chateaudelamottefeuilly.com for advanced orders of the book or interview requests. 

The first mention of a château in La Motte-Feuilly dates from 1170.  We can not confirm whether any of the surviving structures date from this time.

The château's construction spanned several centuries.  Dendrochronological surveys ordered by Christophe Charlier have confirmed that the rectangular tower dates from 1360, the main keep from 1415 and the entrance tower from 1420, all at the time when the château was owned by the de Vaudenay family.

The chapel and the colonnade which upholds it were built around 1510 by Charlotte d'Albret, certainly after the death of César Borgia.  The rest of the château was already in its current structure by that time, as evidenced by the very detailed inventory written at the time of Charlotte d'Albret's death in 1514.  The inventory is of invaluable value as a record of her wealth and standing, interestingly including the first ever mention of a tapisserie from Feuilletin/Aubusson (it lists over seventy) and one of the first mentions ever of a billard table.

The de Maussabré family undertook important renovations in the nineteenth century to render it more agreeable with the standards of that time, including adding several windows, drying the moat around the château and tearing down the wall between the main keep and the entrance tower.  They also were likely responsible for much of the planting of the park and potager fleuri, although we suspect that the Pâris de Monmartel family may have started the process.

Each of the subsequent families have added their imprint on the property, including the current proprietor, who has done extensive work to renovate the dependancies and beautify the park and potager fleuri.

To date, we have not found any evidence of the château ever having served its original purpose as a defensive fortress, despite neighboring cities and castles having been sieged and devastated during various wars and rebellions.  The château also luckily escaped the recommendations of the engineer tasked by the Directoire in 1794 to survey all the castles in l'Indre to recommend which fortifications should be destroyed to remove any threat of counter-revolution.  It appears that the closest that the château may have come to being attacked was in June 1944 by German troops in retaliation for a clandestine attack against the railroad by the French resistance.

Over the centuries, La Motte-Feuilly has been owned by many distinctive French families, its most illustrious proprietor certainly being Charlotte d'Albret, sister of the king of Navarre and great-great-aunt of Henri IV and the forlorn wife of the infamous César Borgia, the son of the Pope Alexandre VI who inspired Alexandre Dumas père's novel Les Borgia and Victor Hugo's play Lucrèce Borgia.

From its origins, it was owned by the families which ruled over nearby Sainte-Sévère, namely the de Palestau, de Sully and de Brosse families.  It then passed by mariage to the de Vaudenay family, which hailed from Bourgogne and constructed the château's three main towers..

Following a long legal case related to the appropriation by Claude de Vaudenay of the fortunes of the de Culant children over whom he had been assigned as tutor, the Vaudenay were obligated to transfer ownership to the de Culan family.

It was the de Culan family which sold La Motte-Feuilly to Charlotte d'Albret in 1504.  After her death in 1514, the property was transferred to her daughter, Louise Borgia, who married Louis II de La Tremoille, who distingued himself during the Guerres d'Italie  under Louis XII and François I, and then Philippe de Bourbon Busset.  It is interesting to note that Philippe descended from an elder grandson of Saint Louis than Henri IV, and thus should have been declared king upon the death of Henri III, had his father not been the illegitimate son of the Prince-Evêque de Liège.

La Motte-Feuilly stayed in the Bourbon-Busset family for several generations and then passed through mariage to the Chabannes family, who, overcome by debts,  were obligated to sell it to Jean Fradet, the comte of Châteaumeillant amongst other titles, in 1651. It was certainly around this time that La Motte-Feuilly was elevated to a vicomté by Louis XIV.

La Motte-Feuilly stayed in the Fradet family for two generations and then transferred by mariage to the de Plessis-Châtillon family, who kept it for another two generations.  Marie-Félicité de Plessis-Châtillon sold its in 1757 to Jean Pâris de Monmartel, the influential and immensively wealthy financier during the reign of Louis XIV and then the regency and reign of Louis XV. Marie-Félicité, tragically, was one of the persons on the last chariot brought to the guillotine during the Terror, meeting her fate on the morning 7 thermidor an II, the day of the arrest of Robespierre.

La Motte-Feuilly transferred to Jean Pâris de Monmartel's son, Armand, the infamous Marquis de Brunoy, about whose extravagances Alexandre Dumas père wrote the eponymously-titled play in 1836.

In 1783, the inheritors of the Marquis de Brunoy sold La Motte-Feuilly to Denis de Maussabré, whose family owned it until 1887.  It was during this time that many modifications were made to the château.  It was also at this time that George Sand published her novel Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois Doré, installing the female protagonist and her father in La Motte-Feuilly and retelling the story of Charlotte d'Albret.

Jacques Pierre Alfred Dumayet bought La Motte-Feuilly in 1887 in legal process led by the debtors of the de Maussabré family.  His family would own La Motte-Feuilly for another three generations.

During much of 1980s and much of the 1990s, the château was owned and occupied by ANPEDA, an organization dedicated to children with speech and hearing difficulties to whom Marie-Louise Dumayet had donated La Motte-Feuilly in 1979.

The château was acquired by the Borel de Bitche family, a belgian/australian family, from ANPEDA in 1998.

The château has been since 2003 the property of Christophe Charlier, an international financier whose maternal family is from the nearby town of Sainte-Sévère.