Chateaubriand House: Departmental Estate of the Vallée-aux-Loups

A magical place, the park is an invitation to romance. Chateaubriand himself planted a large collection of trees, chosen in memory of the countries he visited. It's also a literary work: the writer regarded his trees as his children, tending them with his own hands, writing odes to them, associating them with memories and the female characters in his novels. Very attached to his estate, he wrote in his Mémoires d'outre-tombe : " La Vallée-aux-Loups, of all the things that have escaped me, is the only one I regret ".

From 1807 to 1817, Chateaubriand enjoyed a rich period of literary creation here, during which he began writing his masterpiece, Mémoires d'outre-tombe. At the beginning of the ^20th century, Doctor Henry Le Savoureux turned the house into a place of remembrance dedicated to Chateaubriand, while welcoming numerous artists and writers with his wife Lydie Plekhanov.

The house's collections include works of art relating to Chateaubriand, his family and friends, and the characters in his novels. Numerous books - both first editions and illustrated editions - as well as manuscripts and autographs by Chateaubriand are also kept here. The sheer number and value of these documents in the author's own hand make the Maison de Chateaubriand one of the three most important international institutions housing the writer's writings and autographs, alongside the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Fondation Martin Bodmer.

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