Château de Blois: A Royal Castle in France
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Very High
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- French
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page21 sections
History
Château de Blois is a historic castle in France, built and enlarged by medieval counts and successive French rulers on a defensible promontory above the Loire at Blois. Occupied since the Neolithic period, it developed from a Carolingian fortress into a comital residence, a major royal court, and a complex displaying medieval, Renaissance, and classical architecture.
Early occupation and the medieval fortress
People occupied the promontory in the Neolithic period. Traces of palisades, pottery fragments, and flint tools found beneath the present Salle des Maçons provide evidence of this early settlement. By about 834, a Carolingian stronghold known as Blisum castellum or Blisum castrum stood on the site. Vikings attacked and destroyed the fortress and the town in 854, during the reign of Charles the Bald. The fortress was rebuilt and was mentioned in the foundation charter of Saint-Laumer Abbey in 924.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the fortress became the centre of the territories ruled by the counts of Blois. These powerful feudal lords controlled lands extending from Blois and Chartres to Champagne. Thibaud I probably built a stone great tower in the tenth century, perhaps beneath the present south-west wing, while Odo II enlarged the castle around 1030. A document from about 1080 records Thibaud III administering justice within the fortress, showing that the site already served both residential and governmental purposes.
The castle expanded further during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The collegiate church of Saint-Sauveur was built in the outer courtyard in the twelfth century, alongside the earlier Saint-Calais chapel and two other chapels. Around 1210, Thibaud VI added the building that contained the Great Hall, later known as the Salle des États. After the death of Thibaud IV in 1152, Blois passed to Thibaud V. In 1226, the marriage of Marie of Avesnes to Hugh of Châtillon brought the county and castle to the Châtillon family, a noble house of Burgundian origin.
The Châtillons replaced the surrounding palisade with stone walls and strengthened and enlarged the fortress. The medieval enclosure extended for about 650 metres and included nine round towers and three gates. The counts used the castle as a residence and as a centre for administration and justice. The outer courtyard contained Saint-Sauveur, the chapel of Sainte-Constante, an orchard, stables, and housing for canons and officials. The seigneurial residence occupied the rest of the promontory and included the Great Hall, the counts’ tower, chapels, the Nouveau Logis, and several medieval wings.
The Orléans residence
Financial difficulties led Guy II of Blois-Châtillon to sell Blois and Dunois to Louis of Orléans, the brother of King Charles VI, in 1391 or 1392. Louis took possession in 1397 after Guy’s death. When Louis was murdered in Paris in 1407 on the orders of John the Fearless, his widow, Valentine Visconti, moved to Blois. She repaired the fortifications before dying at the castle in 1408.
In 1429, before leaving to relieve the besieged city of Orléans, Joan of Arc was blessed at the castle’s collegiate church or chapel by Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims. Louis’s son, Charles of Orléans, had been captured by the English at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. He returned to Blois after twenty-five years of captivity in 1440 and made the castle a major literary and cultural centre. A poetry competition held there in 1458 inspired François Villon’s Ballade des contradictions, also called the Ballade du concours de Blois.
Charles enlarged and modernized the medieval residence, although much of his south-west wing was later demolished. His son Louis of Orléans was born at Blois in 1462 and became King Louis XII in 1498. As king, he made the medieval castle his principal royal residence and reduced the importance of Amboise. Between 1498 and 1503, Louis XII and Anne of Brittany rebuilt the complex without its earlier military character. The work was carried out under François de Pontbriand, Colin Biard, and Jacques Sourdeau.
A royal residence under Louis XII and Anne of Brittany
Louis XII and Anne of Brittany created the wing now known as the Louis XII wing, rebuilt Saint-Calais Chapel, added accommodation for the royal household, and developed orchards and gardens. Blois became a preferred winter residence and hosted diplomatic and dynastic events. These included the marriage of Cesare Borgia in 1499, the reception of Philip the Fair and Joanna of Castile in 1501, the marriage of William IX of Montferrat and Anne of Alençon in 1508, and the engagement of Margaret of Angoulême in 1509. Niccolò Machiavelli visited the castle in 1501 and 1510.
Anne of Brittany died at Blois on 9 January 1514, and her funeral took place at Saint-Sauveur. Her daughter Claude of France married Francis of Angoulême in 1514. After becoming King Francis I in 1515, Francis and Claude prepared Blois as a court residence and began a new Renaissance wing and a major royal library.
The Renaissance court
Construction of the Francis I wing began in 1515 but stopped after Claude of France died at Blois in 1524, while Francis was campaigning in Italy. Francis transferred the library to Fontainebleau. It later formed the nucleus of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, France’s national library. Furniture and tapestries were also removed, although Claude’s children remained at Blois and were educated there under Catherine de’ Medici.
Blois continued to serve as a setting for court ceremony and political events. The Affair of the Placards took place there on 18 October 1534, when supporters of the Reformed Church posted attacks on the Mass, including one on the king’s chamber door. The incident ended a period of relative tolerance and was followed by intensified repression of Protestantism in France. Charles V visited Blois in 1539. Pierre de Ronsard met Cassandre Salviati at a ball there in April 1545, and Henry II made a solemn entry into the castle in August 1547 before commissioning decorative work in the Francis I wing. Between 1554 and 1556, Catherine de’ Medici arranged a performance of Sophonisba before the king.
Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III continued to use Blois as a royal residence. Francis II spent the winter of 1559 there with Mary Stuart. The castle also witnessed the reconciliation of Charles IX and the Protestant leader Gaspard de Coligny after the Peace of Saint-Germain, the engagement of Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois in 1572, and meetings of the Estates General in 1576 to 1577 and 1588 to 1589. The Estates General was an assembly of the clergy, nobility, and commoners summoned by the monarchy, usually during political or financial crises.
Blois became the scene of a decisive episode in the Wars of Religion, the sixteenth-century civil and religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in France. On 23 December 1588, Henry III ordered the murder of Henry I, Duke of Guise, in the king’s chamber. The duke’s brother, Cardinal Louis of Lorraine, was killed the following day. Their bodies were burned in a castle fireplace and their ashes scattered. Catherine de’ Medici died at Blois on 5 January 1589, and her funeral was held at Saint-Sauveur.
Classical rebuilding and decline
Henry IV used the castle intermittently and began a major gallery project in the garden of the Louis XII wing in 1598. The gallery and its central pavilion, about 200 metres long, were completed in 1603, but the lateral sections were never built. The construction partly collapsed in 1756 and was demolished about a decade later.
After Henry IV’s death in 1610, Blois became a place of exile for his widow, Marie de’ Medici. In 1626, Louis XIII assigned the county to his brother Gaston of Orléans, who settled at Blois in 1634. Gaston commissioned François Mansart in 1635 to replace much of the castle with a large classical palace. The project was halted in 1638 after the central body and part of the east wing had been built, when Gaston’s financial difficulties prevented further construction. He occupied the Francis I wing and used an observatory installed on the Foix Tower around 1640. Gaston died at Blois on 2 February 1660, after which the castle was largely abandoned.
Louis XIV no longer used the residence, apart from the stay of the widow of the Polish king between 1713 and 1716. In the eighteenth century, former servants and impoverished nobles divided the castle into small apartments. The gardens were abandoned and partly converted into vegetable plots and a farm. After Blois became a diocese, the collegiate chapter moved to Saint-Solenne in 1697.
Military use, revolution, and restoration
Louis XVI proposed selling or demolishing the castle in 1788 because of its cost. When no buyer appeared, the Royal-Comtois cavalry regiment occupied it as a barracks. Military use spared the building from immediate destruction but damaged its interiors. During the Revolution, furniture, statues, and royal emblems were removed or destroyed. The castle was briefly used as a prison, while the equestrian statue of Louis XII, the bust of Gaston of Orléans, and most royal emblems were destroyed or mutilated in 1792. Saint-Sauveur was sold and demolished in 1793, and the gardens were sold and built over.
Napoleon transferred the complex to the city of Blois on 10 August 1810, but lack of funds brought renewed military use. The unfinished part of the Gaston d’Orléans wing was demolished in 1815. Other military alterations included the destruction of fireplaces, the shortening of the Charles d’Orléans Gallery, and the removal of the colonnade before the classical wing.
The castle was classified as a historic monument in 1840. Prosper Mérimée helped secure the end of its barracks use in 1844 and its return to municipal control. Félix Duban, assisted by Jules de La Morandière, restored the Renaissance apartments from 1845 or 1846. Later work was directed by La Morandière, Anatole de Baudot, Jules-André Grenouillot, and Alphonse Goubert. Duban based parts of his restoration on period prints, surveys, photographs, casts, and the research of Louis de la Saussaye. His interiors sometimes reflected nineteenth-century interpretations of medieval and Renaissance decoration, and contemporary critics regarded some of them as overly imaginative, while the exterior restoration generally respected the surviving fabric more closely.
Pierre-Stanislas Maigreau-Blau founded the Museum of Fine Arts of Blois in 1850. It was first installed in the Francis I wing and moved to the Louis XII wing in 1869. A lapidary museum was established in the former kitchens in 1921. Bombing damaged the castle in June 1940 and August 1944, particularly the south façade and the Louis XII wing. The sixteenth-century chapel windows and several roofs were also damaged. Restoration began in 1946 under Michel Ranjard. The fortifications of the town and castle have been protected as historic monuments since 6 November 1942.
A major restoration in the 1990s, directed by Pierre Lebouteu and Patrick Ponsot, repaired roofs, external façades, and floors, especially in the Francis I wing, and repaved the inner courtyard. Gilles Clément redesigned the park. Targeted restoration continues, and the castle remains the property of the city of Blois. The Anne of Brittany Pavilion was protected as a historic monument in 1886. Together, the surviving buildings present architectural history from the medieval period through the Renaissance and classical period.
Remains
Château de Blois occupies a promontory about 250 metres long and 100 metres wide, covering approximately 23,000 square metres. The ground falls steeply on three sides towards the Loire and was formerly protected on the north-east by a dry moat. The present complex is organized around an irregular inner courtyard. Its principal buildings are the Louis XII wing, the Francis I wing, and the Gaston d’Orléans wing, which represent late Gothic, Renaissance, and classical architecture. A gallery and the chapel partly enclose the fourth side.
Medieval enclosure and civic buildings
The medieval enclosure had a curtain wall, a defensive wall joining towers and other strong points, about 650 metres long. Nine round towers and three gates formed its principal defenses, with further towers whose exact positions are uncertain. The Foix Tower survives, while three other medieval towers are partly incorporated into the north-west buildings. Archaeological excavations have also revealed rectangular and round towers along the western curtain wall.
Salle des États
The Salle des États was built for Thibaud VI in 1214. The date was established through dendrochronology, a method that dates timber by comparing its tree rings with established sequences. The hall is the oldest surviving civil Gothic hall in France. It served as a courtroom and ceremonial room before hosting the Estates General in 1576 and 1588.
The building measures approximately 30 by 18 metres and rises above the courtyard and the surrounding street. Pale stone walls support a tall two-pitched slate roof. Inside, two parallel naves are divided by six pointed arches carried on five columns with hooked capitals. Two adjoining timber barrel vaults cover the space, which also contains two vaulted underground levels. A 25-metre passage cut through the rock runs beneath the Louis XII wing, while another passage, about 40 metres long, links the courtyard with the garden of a house outside the complex.
Félix Duban restored and repainted the hall between 1861 and 1866 in an interpretation of thirteenth-century polychromy. The walls imitate masonry and foliage bands, the columns alternate vivid blue and red, and the capitals include gilded pigments. The blue vault bears gold fleurs-de-lis, with about 6,720 painted on the woodwork. Duban also created the large gabled windows, Neo-Gothic fireplace, and Neo-Gothic staircase. Only the small pointed opening in the courtyard-facing gable is original, while the large mullioned windows date from the Louis XII period. Paul-Charles Nicod made the windows bearing the emblems of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, and Jules Loebnitz made the polychrome terracotta floor. Further conservation protected the painted decoration and oak structure in 2006 and 2007.
Castle gates and chapel
The Porte des Champs was the largest gate and the only entrance wide enough for horses and carts. Its portcullis, a vertically lowered fortified gate, and machicolations, openings used by defenders to drop objects onto attackers, formed part of its defenses. The gate was altered in the sixteenth century and completely destroyed in 1860. A second gate on the route from the Porte des Champs had a portcullis, drawbridge, and fixed bridge over the moat before being demolished in the eighteenth century.
The Porte des Jacobins, near the Jacobins convent on the Loire side, served pedestrians. It had two successive doors, a portcullis, and a drawbridge, but was destroyed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The smaller Porte Saint-Martin, probably near Saint-Sauveur, was destroyed during the reign of Louis XII.
Saint-Calais Chapel was begun in 1498 and consecrated in 1508 by Antoine Dufour, bishop of Marseille and the queen’s confessor. Only the Gothic choir survives, comprising the apse, or semi-circular sanctuary end, and two bays. Mansart destroyed the nave while constructing the Gaston d’Orléans wing. The present façade was created by Duban and La Morandière in 1870. It includes a pointed portal, a large Neo-Gothic window, and a spire replacing a probably seventeenth-century bell turret. Max Ingrand’s modern stained glass, made in 1957, depicts historical figures including Joan of Arc and Charles of Blois.
Louis XII wing and former gardens
Louis XII wing
The Louis XII wing was built between 1498 and 1503 in Flamboyant Gothic, a late Gothic style marked by flowing tracery, pointed forms, pinnacles, and elaborate carving, with early Renaissance elements. Its L-shaped plan includes a main body facing the castle square, a south-west extension, and two stair towers. Three principal floors and an inhabitable slate mansard roof form the residential block.
White stone frames the structure, while red and black brick create a regular pattern across the façades. Most of the stone is tuffeau from the quarries of Bourré, with harder stone from the Blois area forming the plinth. Pinnacles, trefoil arches, grotesque sculptures, gargoyles, dormers, brick chimneys, and carved emblems of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany decorate the exterior.
The wing introduced corridors that allowed rooms to remain independent instead of opening one into another. This arrangement was repeated on the ground floor, first floor, and attic. Three staircases and drainage conduits also reflect the period’s concern with residential comfort. The external entrance combines a broad carriage passage with a pedestrian postern beneath a niche. The original equestrian statue of Louis XII, attributed to Guido Mazzoni, was destroyed in 1792 and replaced in 1857 by a reconstruction by Charles Émile Seurre. The king appears crowned and armoured on a richly caparisoned horse.
The entrance niche has pointed arches, pinnacles, gilded fleurs-de-lis on a blue ground, Italianate candelabra reliefs, and a porcupine relief, the emblem of Louis XII. Its original Latin inscription was replaced in the early nineteenth century by the words “Caserne d’infanterie.” The courtyard façade has nine lowered arches supported alternately by columns and square piers. The columns carry fleurs-de-lis and ermine tails associated with Anne of Brittany and Claude of France, while the piers contain arabesque panels and the capitals include foliage, dolphins, cornucopias, and masks. Duban reconstructed the upper balustrade.
The Tour des Champs stands where the Louis XII wing meets the Salle des États. Built in brick and stone, it contains a staircase, irregularly placed windows, a slate roof, dormers, an ovoid frieze, and reliefs of Louis XII’s porcupine. During the restoration of the 1990s, two cherubs were given humorous likenesses of Martine Tissier de Mallerais, then conservator of the castle and museums of Blois, and Jack Lang, then mayor of Blois.
The main staircase spirals around a central cluster of half-columns. Its radial ribs form a multilobed vault with alternating stone and brick compartments, carved vegetal keystones, and a balustrade resembling intertwined branches. The smaller stair tower has a polygonal lower plan, a square upper level, and a pyramidal roof. Since 1869, the wing has housed the Museum of Fine Arts of Blois, whose eight gallery rooms contain paintings and sculptures from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, French and Flemish tapestries from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, portraits from Saint-Germain-Beaupré and Beauregard, and fifty terracotta medallions by Jean-Baptiste Nini. Duban reconstructed the fireplaces after the originals had been removed.
Charles d’Orléans Gallery and garden remains
The Charles d’Orléans Gallery was built between 1440 and 1445 to connect the older residence with Saint-Calais Chapel. Once more than twice its present length, it was partly demolished in the seventeenth century. It is the earliest part of the palace to combine stone and brick. Six very low basket-handle arches survive, supported by octagonal columns, with brick upper walls, mullioned windows, and stepped dormers.
The former royal gardens included the Jardin de Bretonnerie, the Vergers des fossés, the Jardin de la Reine, and the Jardin du Roi. The Jardin de la Reine measured approximately 200 by 90 metres and contained four formal parterres, an octagonal pavilion, a gilded bronze statue of Saint Michael, and an Italian marble fountain dating from 1502 to 1503. The Jardin du Roi included an orchard, a 30-metre-deep well, and an irrigation system serving the palace gardens. Three terraces were connected to the Nouveau Logis by the Galerie des Cerfs, which displayed painted wooden figures of deer, dogs, and falcons, along with a terracotta stag with real antlers and a wax doe.
Anne of Brittany Pavilion
The Anne of Brittany Pavilion and the orangery are the principal surviving structures of the former gardens. The pavilion began as an early-sixteenth-century belvedere and is also called the Bains de Catherine de Médicis, although the historical reason for that name is unclear. It is an unusual Gothic example of an ornamental pavilion derived from Italian models.
Built of stone and brick, the pavilion has three octagonal levels about 7.85 metres in diameter beneath a polygonal slate roof. Four small projecting wings surround the central body. One contains a staircase, while the eastern wing contains an oratory. The ground-floor balustrade bears the initials of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany. Inside are two large octagonal rooms with Gothic fireplaces, an oratory with a five-ribbed ceiling, and a basement room with a brick vault. Covered and underground passages formerly connected the pavilion with the gardens and orangery. Anatole de Baudot restored it in 1891. It later housed the Society of Sciences and Letters of Loir-et-Cher, while the orangery became a restaurant.
Francis I wing
The Francis I wing was built between 1515 and 1524 in an Italianate Renaissance style. Renaissance architecture introduced more regular classical proportions and Italianate details such as pilasters, candelabra, shells, and putti, while the wing retained several late Gothic features. It replaced two feudal buildings and was extended across the thirteenth-century curtain wall, incorporating three circular medieval defensive towers, including the Château-Renault Tower.
Construction took place in several phases. The eastern section began in 1515 to 1516, while the western section and monumental staircase followed later. Differences in the roof structure show that the courtyard rooms and the loggia gallery were initially separate operations. The courtyard half has a conventional two-pitched roof, while the outer half has a steeper additional slope. High roofs, dormers, gargoyles, and irregular façade spacing preserve late Gothic elements.
Loggia façades and staircase
The exterior Loggia Facade stands seven metres in front of the earlier curtain wall on a high stone plinth. A loggia is an open or partly open gallery defined by arches or columns. At Blois, the façade combines loggias with projecting guard chambers, non-communicating niches, basket-handle arches, mullioned openings, Italianate pilasters, and reliefs showing the Labours of Hercules. Its original garden-facing side looked towards the gardens created by Louis XII.
The first loggia level has four projecting balconies, one forming the apse of a small oratory. Its parapets carry the initials and emblems of Francis I and Claude of France, while the upper parapets are plain. Large decorated chimneys and a two-storey dormer bearing Francis I’s salamander rise above the roof. The courtyard façade is divided by Italianate pilasters and horizontal mouldings. Its cornice contains dentils, ovolos, shell-like arches, and a pierced balustrade formed partly by the crowned initials of Francis I and Claude. The façade is asymmetrical because the monumental staircase is off-centre and part of the wing was demolished for the Gaston d’Orléans project.
The monumental staircase is an octagonal open-well spiral staircase, with three sides embedded in the building. It combines a Gothic spiral form with Renaissance sculpture, including statues, balustrades, candelabra, putti, salamanders, crowns, and the initials F and C. Broad openings pierce its external sides between rectangular buttresses. Carved panels, balconies, an octagonal upper loggia, and a balustrade with salamanders complete the design. Some panels and royal symbols were reconstructed during nineteenth-century restoration. The suggestion that Leonardo da Vinci designed the staircase remains conjectural.
Royal apartments and collections
The ground floor contains former service rooms and the bases of medieval towers. Upper floors contain reconstructed royal apartments, with public rooms arranged towards the courtyard and private rooms towards the former gardens. The Queen’s Gallery has glazed terracotta tiles installed by Duban after a fifteenth-century model, forming blue, white, and yellow geometric patterns. It displays a 1572 Italian harpsichord by Giovanni Antonio Baffo, altered around 1880 by Leopoldo Franciolini, a 1875 faience mandolin by Josaphat Tortat, a 1867 faience violin by Ulysse Besnard, and a wooden, ivory-inlaid dancing-master’s pochette, a small violin.
The gallery also contains busts of Henry II, Francis I, Charles IX, Henry III, Henry IV, and Pierre de Ronsard. Other objects include paintings of the Princess of Conti and Marie de’ Medici with the Dauphin, together with coins bearing the effigies of Louis XII, Francis I, Henry II, Charles IX, Henry III, and Henry IV.
The Queen’s Guard Captains’ Room was created by combining two rooms. Its two Renaissance fireplaces bear the salamander of Francis I and the ermine of Claude of France. One has five gilded niches with candelabra and shell decoration. The room contains a plaster bust of Francis I by Jean-Baptiste Halou, an elaborately carved wooden cupboard, Isidore Patrois’s painting of Francis I granting Rosso titles and abbey benefices, and Goudji’s modern sculpture Salamandre, nutrisco et extinguo, made of silver, serpentine, ebony, and gold and donated in 2007.
The Guard Room was built across the medieval curtain wall. Vitet painted its walls between 1845 and 1847, and it now presents arms from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, including polearms, a fauchard, partisan, corsèque, halberd, and armour.
Catherine de’ Medici’s chamber, also called the Chamber of Secrets or studiolo, contains 237 original carved wooden panels dating from about 1520. The panels conceal four mechanically operated cupboards, probably intended for art objects, ceramics, documents, and precious books. Their later association with poisons belongs to romantic literature rather than the documented purpose of the cupboards.
The Queen’s Chamber became Catherine de’ Medici’s royal chamber, where she died in 1589. Its reconstructed decoration repeatedly uses the monogram of Henry II and Catherine. Furnishings include a late-sixteenth-century oak and beech canopy bed, a seventeenth-century oak chest showing the beheading of Saint John the Baptist, a sixteenth-century walnut cupboard with mother-of-pearl and ivory inlay, and a Spanish bargueño, a portable writing cabinet with compartments and a decorated façade, fitted with later legs.
The oratory draws on the library of Anne de Montmorency at Écouen. It has original Neoclassical door frames, an apse with three mullioned windows, nineteenth-century stained glass by Claudius Lavergne and Michel Dumas, and a triptych associated with the queen. The second floor contains the King’s Apartments, including the reconstructed New Cabinet of Henry III. Its decoration was based on a fragment showing a siren, and the room contains a tapestry representing Paris, prince of Troy, together with surviving painted woodwork from a seventeenth-century cabinet.
The Salle des Guise contains paintings of figures and events associated with the Wars of Religion, including Henry III, the Duke of Guise, the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Duchess of Nemours, and the funeral of the Duke of Guise. The Council Room has a monumental fireplace with a gilded salamander and nineteenth-century Renaissance-style furnishings. They include a chestnut-wood cooler displayed at the 1862 Universal Exhibition, an octagonal marble-and-wood table with siren-shaped supports, a Corsican orbicular granite vase, a walnut cupboard by John Deeble Crace, and a buffet by Joseph Pierre Janselme.
Château-Renault Tower and lapidary museum
The Château-Renault Tower is a medieval tower incorporated into the Francis I wing. It retains garden-facing loggias, sculpted panels, pilasters, a high roof, and a stair turret with a lantern. Its original Gothic lantern, which had flying arches and pinnacles, was removed in the seventeenth century.
The lapidary museum occupies the former Francis I kitchens beside the Salle des États. Its collections include sculptures and architectural fragments from the castle, such as stone gargoyles, plaster salamanders made under Duban to replace royal emblems destroyed during the Revolution, the stone-and-plaster pediment of the Gaston d’Orléans wing, plaster studies and casts by Duban, excavated medieval objects from the promontory, and Carolingian-period material.
Gaston d’Orléans wing
The Gaston d’Orléans wing was designed by François Mansart and built between 1635 and 1638 in a classical style. It occupies the rear of the courtyard opposite the Louis XII wing and replaced earlier buildings associated with Charles d’Orléans, the Breton garrison, and Marie de’ Medici. The unfinished wing consists of a central body, short courtyard projections, and lateral masses.
Its inner façade combines Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders with a concave portico, a central pediment, and sculptures of Minerva and Mars. The outer façade is simpler, using Ionic and Corinthian orders and triangular pediments over the projecting side sections. The entrance façade has a two-level pediment, trophies of arms, an eagle, a lion skin, and a bust of Gaston. The bust is a 1915 copy by Alfred Halou after a lost original by Jacques Sarrazin. The other façade sculptures were made by Sarrazin and Simon Guillain.
Mansart designed a monumental staircase leading to a central hall and double dome. The present three-flight staircase was built in 1933 after the model of Mansart’s staircase at Maisons-Laffitte. Its elliptical dome has eight sculpted sections attributed to Simon Guillain and Michel Anguier and is topped by a lantern. The first floor contains the two-storey Festival Hall with an elliptical vault, two Neoclassical fireplaces, a niche for a statue of Gaston, and a gallery at the level of the upper windows. Other rooms include a circular salon, a salon with arcades, and a salon whose vaults are supported by two central piers.
The wing contains the municipal library, temporary-exhibition and congress spaces, and multipurpose rooms. It housed the Natural History Museum of Blois from 1903 to 1914. The collections returned to the castle after the Second World War and were transferred to the Jacobins convent in 1984.
Foix Tower
The circular Foix Tower is a surviving thirteenth-century corner tower on the southern terrace beside the Gaston d’Orléans wing. It defended the south-west corner and the Porte du Foix at the foot of the promontory. Four levels survive, three of them vaulted and pierced by defensive openings. The lowest level became a basement after the terrace was raised.
The tower lost its defensive role in the sixteenth century and was used by the Chamber of Accounts until 1635. An astronomical observatory was later installed on its summit as a small red-brick and stone structure reached by a slate-covered wooden stair turret. Earlier defensive features include a moat-level entrance reached by a removable ladder, a bent passage within the wall, a heavy wooden door, a machicolation, and rows of arrow slits.
