Chateau de Belebat

The dawn of the 1500s in France’s Loire Valley saw grand lords with incredible wealth, vast properties and towering castles, emerging from the feudalism of the Middle Ages, into the awakening and changes of the Renaissance.

During the second half of the 16th century, Belebat was the hunting lodge of the Scolin brothers — a noble family from Loudun (30km south of Belebat). Then as now, a hunting lodge was not a full-time dwelling, but more of a weekend retreat with utilitarian buildings. Belebat was at that time a large manor proudly commanding the vast forest around it with some stables and a stone vaulted cellar.

The name Belebat (often found as Bel Ébat) was in fashion for recreational estates during the Renaissance. While nowadays there can be different interpretations of the words — some even a bit off-color — it’s fair to say that Belebat was named as a “happy place”.

Not far outside the boundaries of Belebat, on the banks of the river Veude, stood an 11th century fortress. Between 1507 and 1543, artisans worked day and night to transform the outdated fortress into an imposing castle for the young Henri de Bourbon, Duke of Montpensier. on the grounds stood the magnificent chapel dedicated to Saint Louis — today, one of the remaining five Sainte-Chapelles in France. With that restoration, the beautiful Château de Champigny Sur Veude was born and our story began to take shape.

A pastoral 20-minute walk separates the Château de Champigny Sur Veude from Belebat. By the end of the 16th century, what once was a playground for the Scolin brothers and their friends was then given to a new player; Charles de Bremond became the first Lord of Belebat and his family the only one to play host within its walls for over a hundred and fifty years.

The Bremonds, originally from Aquitaine, come from an ancient chivalric house regarded as one of the noblest in France’s western provinces. There is no record of Charles de Bremond marrying. However, historical files tantalizingly state that two baby boys were “given to him.” Perhaps an early version of modern adoption —at least that is how we fantasize about it.

Charles de Bremond moved to the region as one of the most trusted advisor for the young Duke. to honour his friend and Patron, Charles named his son “Henri” and the Duke de Montpensier became little Henri’s godfather, establishing a stronger bond between the Bremonds and the powerful House of Bourbon.

Henri and his brother, Claude, grew up in this land. They run through the same hallways, crossed the same doors and hid behind similar trees to the ones standing outside my window …in a similar forest to the one that now fills the horizon …on the exact same ground our tire trampoline catapults our boys to happiness.  

Charles de Bremond now lived in a hunting lodge, a basic building with only four bedrooms for his family of seven. No, this was not going to work! Fortunately for all of us, Bremond’s fortune and position allowed him to turn the dull building into the current full-fledged château, a proper noble home for a rural French squire with a typically extended family.

There are several witnesses to testify that Charles de Bremond was the builder of Château de Belebat as we know it today, one being a pair of stones on the façade of the château, on which the date “1601” is etched. The grand expansion during the 17th century  also included a very large barn with another date, “1626”, carved on the white keystone of a side entrance — outside its heavy wooden doors we can still see were the wine press was placed. A 70m2 game room in which boar, deer, ducks, feasant and rabbits were hung to dry was constructed above the vaulted cellar, dug only partly underground because the property’s high water level.

Between 1610 and 1643, back when the magnificent Château de Versailles itself was a hunting lodge and the Louvre was not yet a museum, lived a childish and paranoid King. Convinced people were after him, Louis XIII created a corps of bodyguards —becoming the first king to have such personal guards. This elite corps was composed of highly trained and very loyal men of noble background. Being that close to the king became a sign of status and soon every squire wanted to be part of the club. Upon each noble in his new mini-army, Louis XIII bestowed one piece of gleaming state-of-the-art weaponry: the musket. That is why these proud musket-carrying bodyguards were called musketeers. Henri de Bremond, godson of the Duke of Montpensier, went on to become a captain of these musketeers.

Henri de Bremond had two sons, Charles and Henry. With young Louis XIV on the throne, Charles de Bremond fulfilled his loyal duty to the Crown as the bodyguard of the Queen Mother Anne of Austria —the unhappy Spanish princess trapped in a loveless marriage to Louis XIII— stitching the Bremond family tightly to the royal house.  Henry served his king as a captain in the regiment of Champagne. He was killed at the Battle of Steenkerque in Belgium during the Nine Years War (1688-1697), at the age of 50 years —Did you know that this conflict between Louis XIV of France against a European coalition of Austria, The Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, Spain, England and Savoy, is considered by some historians to be the first global war?

Tucked away, out of reach of dust and sunlight, in the labyrinth of the national historical archives of the city of Tours, a six-page document sleeps in a rarely opened drawer. It is a survey of the Lordship of Belebat written in May of 1660. This ancient handwritten survey gives a precise description of the château and its outbuildings, stating the size of the rooms of the house and their use. On the last page, below the faded signatures, there is a small sketch, simple and lacking accurate proportions, yet very important as it matches the current home. This sketch shows that Charles Bremond’s renovations from 1601 were preserved during the 19th century restoration. According to the sketch, all the main rooms have the same 5.5 meters of inner depth, indicating that the entire building was built on one go, back in the 1500’s. After the Bremonds renovations there were seven bedrooms, a busy kitchen filled with heavy copperware steamed away day and night next to the grand salon where people sat for supper, played games, had important conversations and unimportant discussions. At one end of this large room, a majestic fireplace, carved in tuffeau —the local limestone— ruled the grand salon with its roaring glow. It was here, in the grand salon with the flickering pulse, that the Bremonds did almost everything since it was the only communal space within the château walls. At one end of the 30 meters long home, there was a cozy little office for the master of the house, exactly where we are now planning our increasingly modernized country kitchen.

The extensive survey also included the numerous outbuildings —most of which remain on the property. Among these is the monumental barn with a small lean-to against one of its outside walls, were the stableman found his bed at the end of the long day. There are beautiful stables; farming sheds with their heavy iron hay baskets pegged to the walls and unmovable stones troughs laying on the dusty ground. There is a laundry room and a bakery —whose scorching oven not only baked the family’s daily bread and cakes, but was also used for all sorts of housework— and an entire building with workshops for carpentry and all the endless repairs to buildings and numerous farming equipment. There was also a small chapel for private ceremonies as well as comunal service —sadly no longer in the estate. The list finishes with a windowless game room over the old stone vaulted cellar.

The château was a self-sufficient organism, the family making its own bread and wine, and harvesting vegetables for lunch and dinner from the garden across the road. In this document, there are also 53 chestnut trees within the forest — just imagine those chestnut pies cooling by the window on a crisp winter day! 

The Bremonds kept the Lordship of Belebat throughout the 17th century to the 1760s, becoming the only family in Belebat’s history to live within its great stone walls for over a hundred and fifty years. Then, Bertrand Poirier des Bournais (1665-1735), governor of Champigny-surVeude, bought Château de Belebat for his newlywed son. In 1764, the name Joseph Poirier of Beauvais appears in records as Lord of Belebat. The new master of the house, however, did not find shelter within its three-feet-thick walls for too long… during the French Revolution (1789-1799), the Poiriers marched together to the almighty guillotine.

Vacant, Château de Belebat became terribly neglected.

Under the light of a post-revolutionary France, came another injury to its spirit:  It was broken up —land separated from buildings. The vast forest was shredded to be kept as farming fields, while the stables, workshops and half the gatekeeper cottage was sold alongside the chateau as a mini-estate. Among the few objects belonging to the Poiriers that escaped the rage of the Revolution, was a document of the Lordship of Belebat dating from the late 18th century. It describes Belebat as a noble house and reveals that the external appearance of the house hadn’t changed much since 1601, when Charles de Bremond carved the digits of the year into the white stones of a window on the west façade of his new family home.

After this, the record goes dry. It is as if no one cared enough about the château to bother recording their life within it. The majestic fireplace in the grand salon might have been lit, but no gleaming warmth transcended time to kept the glittering flame of history going.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Sadly, there is no much record of Belebat’s fate after the Revolution. In 1878, almost a century after the first Bastille day, Belebat’s lights went back on. That year, historian Carre Busseralle described Belebat as a farm, adding briefly and without emotion that the château is in ruins. A written description in 1899 by the Archaeological Society of Touraine calls Château de Belabat “a curious construction dated 1600 and 1601 with modern revisions.” It appears that the château was restored around 1880 but that the exterior coatings hid all signs of that restoration.

The new millennium brought another tragedy to Belebat.  In 2003, a devastating fire erased almost five hundred years of history —a catastrophic event engraved in the locals’ memory as an intentional heritage homicide. The fire did its grim work. While it could not destroy the chateau’s stone exterior, it consumed the inside of the house. Nothing was left between the stone walls. Floors, wood beams, fireplaces, moldings and ceilings... all gone. The impressive stone staircase and its fantastically carved oak banister collapsed, and was buried under tons of rubble. The renaissance château Charles de Bremond so lovingly built for his family lay on the ground, in pieces. Belebat burnt for five days and it took two months for the remains to cool down. Restoration started soon after the ashes were cleared. By 2005, 80 percent of the roof was reinstated, the internal floors, new electric and plumbing networks placed. Works started on the façades when suddenly there was no money left to continue. To cover debt, the entire estate was given to the masonry company and roofing outfit.

Belebat was left lifeless. Silenced. Once again, abandoned …remaining like that for over a decade.

The morning of January 4, 2016, Jeff and I parked the car under a glorious chestnut tree outside the gate of Belebat. As we turned to take our first-ever look at the imposing building rising up behind the stone wall, a spontaneous gasp stopped our hearts.

We were home.