Ainay-le-Vieil, the little Carcassonne - historic castle in France

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1999 by DeCourcy E. McIntosh

In the early 1950s, when a group of chateau owners in the old province of Berry, in the heartland of France, first decided to open their doors to tourists, one of the most active and revered of the group, Baron Geraud d'Aligny (1914-1982), hit upon a slogan to advertise Ainay-le-Vieil [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. I OMITTED], the chateau where he and his wife, Jeanne de Colbert d'Aligny (1915-1992), were living and raising their six children.(1) Pur joyau Renaissance dans son fier ecrin feodal (a flawless gem of the Renaissance in its own proud medieval jewel box), wrote the baron, an amateur poet, capturing with a single romantic flourish the multiple personalities - military and residential, sober and exuberant - of the castle his wife had inherited in a line of succession extending from 1467. With its finely detailed corps de logis (family quarters) erected against the inner surface of a high, octagonal, crenellated curtain wall [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. IV OMITTED], Ainay-le-Vieil indeed resembles a precious Renaissance jewel locked in a medieval casket.(2)

The problem with the baron's slogan was that, for all its lapidary quality, the family quarters possess hardly any classically Renaissance features. Essentially they belong to the so-called flamboyant Gothic, a style that remained viable in France long after Italian Renaissance architecture had infiltrated the rest of northern Europe.(3) The baron thus acquiesced in the more prosaic slogan "the little Carcassonne," a phrase chosen to call attention to the picturesque ensemble of conical towers and massive wall that form the visitor's first impression of the chateau [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. I OMITTED], comparable to the medieval walled town of Carcassonne in Languedoc.

Even in France an unbroken chain of title of 532 years is unusual, and the weight of patrimony is as powerful at Ainay as anywhere in the country. Before she died, the Baroness d'Aligny, by then a widow, transferred ownership of the chateau to her direct heirs, who manage it today both for their own use and for the public, augmenting its appeal to visitors at no sacrifice of family privacy.

The principal interior improvement has been the restoration of the small private chapel off the grand salon whereby layers of nineteenth-century decorative paint were stripped to reveal an exquisite ensemble of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wall paintings [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. XV OMITTED].

When a tempest in 1984 devastated the seventeen-acre parc a l'anglaise, Marie-Sol de La Tour d'Auvergne, the younger Aligny daughter, and the garden designer Pierre Joyau transformed a section of the park into a rose garden in the seventeenth-century style. This garden is now a key weapon in the chateau's promotional arsenal, for in it are displayed some two hundred varieties that trace the development of rose culture in France since the fifteenth century [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. XIX OMITTED].

La Tour d'Auvergne and Joyau next began an adaptive restoration of the four old chartreuses, (walled enclosures) in which tender fruits and vegetables were grown for the chateau table [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. VII OMITTED]. These enclosures were part of the seventeenth-century potager (kitchen garden). Today each of these four-square plots is planted to a theme and in a style suggested by the long history of the chateau. One is devoted to medieval piety and meditation, a second contains medicinal herbs typical of a Renaissance monastic garden, still another is an ornamental orchard, and the fourth, the jardin blanc aux parterres de broderie, reflects the formality and austerity of a seventeenth-century jardin a la francaise. Outside the walls of the chartreuses a small cutting garden adds a note of contemporary informality.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of neolithic habitations near Ainay, but the history of Ainay-le-Vieil itself as a dwelling place begins in Gallo-Roman times, when in all likelihood it was the site of a villa or agricultural complex. The lawlessness unleashed by the decline of the Roman Empire would certainly have required that the villa be fortified.

Situated 175 miles south of Paris in the upper valley of the Cher, a tributary of the Loire River, Ainay, then spelled Ennai, was first recorded in the twelfth-century Cartulaire de Champagne as belonging to the sire de Bourbon, in whose family it remained for about a hundred years. In the fourteenth century, with the Hundred Years' War raging, the fortress became the property of the Sully family, and it fell to Jean de Sully to transform the primitive fortification into the sophisticated stronghold we see today. Sully's original chateau, erected in a single phase, consisted of two concentric stone curtain walls encircling a keep. The circumference of the outer wall, which was demolished more than five hundred years ago, can only be estimated. The inner wall, standing today, is fifty feet tall, ten feet thick at the base, and almost a thousand feet in circumference. The rosy beige color is the result of the weathering of the mixture of local sand and gravel covering the rough masonry.