A FIFTEEN-MINUTE DRIVE from the entrance to the Chambord forest, the regal château de Cheverny was built in the 1600s by the Hurault family to replace a sixteenth-century half-medieval fortress, half-pleasure palace that had in turn replaced buildings going back to the year 1315. In 1528, the owner of the earlier château, also a member of the Hurault family, had to give it up for financial reasons. It was eventually acquired in 1551 by Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henri II, who had given her possession of the beautiful Loire Valley Chenonceau château four years earlier. Diane had several good reasons to want a home such as Cheverny. There was ongoing litigation about her right to use Chenonceau and she wanted another residence in the area until the matter was resolved in order to better keep an eye on her rival, Henri’s wife Catherine de Medici. After the litigation was resolved in her favor in 1555, Cheverny remained her home base while she oversaw reconstruction at Chenonceau. In 1565, five years after losing Chenonceau to her rival upon Henri’s death, Diane sold Cheverny back to descendants of the Huraults, the original owners. In the early 1600s, they razed the structure to construct a new, elegant château of local white stone, flanked with two large, squaredomed pavilions.
CHÂTEAU DE CHEVERNY
Eventually, heirs once again sold the château to outsiders; then in 1825, it was once again repurchased by a member of the family and luxuriously furnished with antiques to match the elegant fireplaces, painted paneling and ceiling beams.
In 1922, the owners opened the château’s grounds and certain rooms to the public, one of the first private châteaux in France to do so. In 1939, the family put part of the château and several outbuildings at the disposition of the Musées Nationaux, a decision the owner, the marquis de Vibraye, may have begun to rue when depot workers damaged stone steps of the château’s main staircase and tiles of the vestibule’s classic black and white floor while moving crates.
Ninety-one crates arrived at Cheverny from the Louvre’s Department of Near Eastern Antiquities, plus 352 crates from the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. One item was too big to bring into the château: a 13-foot-high crate containing the almost 3,000-year-old Babylonian law code engraved on a stone stele. When workers could not fit the crate though the château’s small doors, it was taken to Valençay.
GRAND SALON AT CHEVERNY, USED FOR MUSÉES NATIONAUX STORAGE
More than 400 additional crates arrived from the Cluny and Camondo museums, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and from other public institutions. Some items were brought down to the château’s basements, while others were dispersed among four ground-floor rooms, including the sumptuous formal drawing room, the grand salon. The items least vulnerable to dampness went to outbuildings, including a former orangerie that the marquis had only recently turned into a small hunting museum whose walls sported the antlers of two thousand stags in commemoration of Cheverny’s long hunting tradition.
The marquis also ceded rooms in the château for the lodging of the two curators and the head guard plus their families. Eighteen additional guards were lodged in outbuildings. Outside work hours, the guards filled their time growing vegetables and raising chickens and rabbits as well as painting and wallpapering their simple quarters and decorating them with posters and etchings. But work hours were a more serious matter, and there were strict security procedures, as at all the depots. At each depot, sentinels were to stand guard day and night, with attention to nighttime security, when potential intruders trying to approach from the surrounding woods of the countryside châteaux could not easily be seen. To address this concern, instructions indicated that guards were to be stationed close by each château and accompanied by dogs, the instructions noting that “[a] dog that barks is worth at least three sentinels. This does not mean a police dog, any noisy dog will do just fine.” And if a nighttime intruder were to be spotted, the instructions were quite clear: “Shoot on sight.”
Although Cheverny was a popular tourist destination on the Loire châ teau circuit, the marquis de Vibraye had agreed to suspend public visits when the artwork and antiquities arrived in 1939. But by spring 1940, as the drôle de guerre stretched on, he reconsidered, writing to Jaujard on April 18 that he had invested considerable sums of money in Cheverny and more than five years of construction and publicity to attract the public. The château should be partially reopened to them, said the marquis, because life was returning to normal. He spoke a bit too soon. Just over two months later, German soldiers would be at the front door.