Château de Bussy-Rabutin Where to stay near the satirical writer's residence

Reworked in the 16^th and 17^th centuries on medieval foundations, the château owes its fame to Roger de Rabutin, Count of Bussy (1618–1693), a brilliant soldier, academician and cousin of Madame de Sévigné. A wit with too sharp a pen, in 1665 he published the Histoire amoureuse des Gaules, a satire of the manners of the court.

An offended Louis XIV had him imprisoned in the Bastille for a year, then exiled him for good to his Burgundian estates. Bussy would spend the last twenty-seven years of his life there, turning his château into a decorative manifesto — at once an ironic homage and a settling of scores with Versailles.

Beneath the bedchamber windows, two mottoes evoke the Marquise de Montglas, the mistress who abandoned Bussy in his disgrace: "She flees the bad weather" and "She lures only to ruin".

All the wounded tenderness of the exile is held in these few painted words. Pause here for a moment: this is where Bussy gives up, without a cry, the sorrow of a forgotten courtier.