Château de la PouzerieThevet-Saint-Julien · Berry
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The castle, and the people in it

A private house, still lived in, with a documented line of owners running five and a half centuries. It is not a monument, it is not listed, and it is not open to the public. You see it because you are staying in it.

The château at night, the round tower lit from below and the doorway glowing.
The stair tower after dark.
The round stair tower and the tiled roof of the castle, seen from the grass. A plant on a stand in a deep stone window reveal, showing the thickness of the wall.

The building

A tall rectangular block of three levels, with a circular stair tower on the courtyard side and a larger tower behind holding the cabinets. Horizontal mullioned windows, a steep tiled roof edged with decorative ramps. It was built at the beginning of the sixteenth century, on foundations a good deal older.

It was never seriously fortified. When the engineer Delalande looked it over in 1794 he noted only a few gun openings. That is a dating clue, and it is also the point: this has always been a house.

A metre of sixteenth-century stone - which is also why the wi-fi only reaches part of the house.

The line

Five and a half centuries of named owners, from the first surviving record to the historian who wrote the book on the nearest town.

1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 des Barres 1439 Carcat 1540s Chamborand 1570s Bourdaloue 1615 Peschant 1740 Simon 1789 Duguet 19th c.
  1. 1439Jacques des Barres, esquire, seigneur de la Pouzerie, pays homage to the lord of La Châtre. It is the first record of the house. A further dénombrement follows in 1459, describing holdings along the road from Ars to La Châtre - the same road that now carries the footpath past our door.
  2. 1540-1550Jean Carcat, a lawyer of Issoudun, holds the fief.
  3. Last third of the 16th c.Pierre de Chamborand - knight of the king's order, chamberlain to the Duc d'Alençon, lieutenant-general of the Berry, governor of the Grosse Tour de Bourges. His son Louis dies at thirty in Madrid in 1615, in the service of the Spanish royal family in the Low Countries.
  4. c. 1615The Bourdaloue family of Bourges, probably Michel Bourdaloue - a relative of the celebrated preacher Louis Bourdaloue.
  5. 1740Bought for 4,400 livres by Jean II Peschant, who moved in and took the name. His son Étienne II was hunting captain to the Comte d'Artois - the future Charles X - and styled himself sieur de la Pouzerie in his marriage contract of 1781.
  6. 1789Sold in the 1780s to Aubin Simon, who as Simon de la Pouzerie sat among the Third Estate delegates for the bailliage of Berry on 23 March 1789.
  7. 19th centuryCaptain Claude-Charles Duguet (1847-1895), regional historian writing as Jean du Pontaulais, whose Histoire de La Châtre of 1896 is still the standard work on the town seven kilometres from this door.

Sources

This history was researched and written by the owner of the house, working from the archives. Its footnotes rest on Hubert's Inventaire-sommaire (1901), d'Hozier's Armorial général, Chénon's note in the Creuse society's Mémoires (1919), and the Archives parlementaires (1868).

Your hosts

Richard and Marie-Jo

We live here - not nearby, here - and we have been taking guests for nine years. Hospitality is what our guests write about more than anything else: seventy-four of eighty-nine reviews mention it. Between us we speak French, English, German and Italian, and we will know where you should have dinner.

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Ask us about your dates

There is no booking calendar on this site, and that is deliberate: with three rooms we would rather answer you ourselves than let a screen guess. Tell us when you would like to come and you will get a real answer with a real price.

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