Pagoda of Chanteloup

At the edge of the forest of Amboise, a slender tower of pale stone rises in seven diminishing tiers above a half-moon sheet of water. The Pagoda of Chanteloup, about 44 metres tall, is one of the finest garden follies to survive from eighteenth-century France: a Chinese fantasy in outline, yet in every detail of its columns, ironwork and ornament a work of pure Louis XVI classicism. It is almost all that remains of the Château de Chanteloup, an estate once compared by contemporaries to Versailles.

Its builder was Étienne-François, Duke of Choiseul, Louis XV's chief minister, who had owned Chanteloup since 1761. In December 1770 he fell from favour and was ordered to retire there, but instead of an empty exile he found his house crowded with friends and admirers who defied the king to visit him. Shortly before his exile was lifted in 1775, he commissioned the architect Louis-Denis Le Camus to raise a monument to their loyalty. Work began on 2 September 1775 and was completed on 30 April 1778, and an inscription composed by the scholar Abbé Barthélemy, a regular guest, dedicates the tower to Choiseul's gratitude. The visitors' names are said to have been engraved on marble tablets inside the first floor. The outline recalls the earlier pagoda by William Chambers at Kew, but here the base is a circular peristyle of sixteen columns and sixteen piers, each storey is set back like the sections of a telescope, four wrought-iron balconies ring the tower, and a staircase of 149 steps climbs through the vaulted floors to the top, crowned by a gilded globe. The pagoda stood at the meeting point of seven long avenues cut through the forest, and the repetition of the number seven, with a crescent pool at its foot, has led some to read a Masonic symbolism into the plan, though nothing confirms it.

After Choiseul's death the estate passed to the Duke of Penthièvre, then to the chemist and minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal; the château itself was demolished in 1823, leaving the pagoda and its park. The site has been listed as a historic monument since 1937 and fully classified in 1996. Amboise, the town a few kilometres away, grew up around the royal château on the Loire where Leonardo da Vinci spent his last years at the nearby manor of Clos Lucé.

Getting there

The pagoda stands about 3 km south-west of the centre of Amboise, in the Loire Valley, and about 21 km east of Tours. Tours Val de Loire Airport (TUF) is about 19 km away. Amboise railway station lies on the line between Tours and Orléans.