One of the Last Great Loire Valley Châteaux Still Lived In

Behind a cupboard door: a tablecloth seventeen meters (56 feet) long, the embroidered trousseau of a marquise married in 1847, trunks of theater costumes. Barbara de Nicolaÿ, of the owning family, opens the linen rooms and the staff quarters, rooms almost no one gets to see. She also goes down to the vaulted kitchens, where the stoves are still fired up from June to November to make jam from the kitchen garden.

Before the backstage come the salons: the bronze angel from the Sainte-Chapelle and its replica, the great gilded gallery, and above all the studiolo, eight square meters painted in the 16th century and found under a false ceiling. The tour ends in the terraced gardens above the Loir, and in two rooms under restoration that will soon join the tour.