Talcy Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Talcy Castle, whose lordship is recorded from the thirteenth century, was transformed from 1517 onwards by the banker Bernard Salviati. Its Renaissance architecture is distinguished by its restraint, with neither marble nor perfect symmetry. In 1562, Catherine de' Medici hosted a peace conference there between Catholics and Protestants. The poet Pierre de Ronsard sang of Cassandre Salviati, whom he had met at a ball in Blois in 1545; the Protestant poet Agrippa d'Aubigné took refuge there after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572), hopelessly in love with Diane Salviati — episodes that earned the castle the nickname "château des muses". From 1718, the Burgeat family turned it into a farm estate; in the nineteenth century, the Stapfer family ran an intellectual salon there, welcoming Stendhal, Delacroix and Mérimée, while Albert Stapfer experimented there with the first French daguerreotypes. The property has belonged to the French State since 1933 and is managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux.