The gallery over the Cher: sixty metres, eighteen windows, two doors
Sixty metres, six wide, eighteen windows
Those are the operator’s own figures, from the printed guide leaflet that comes with the ticket. One room, a wall of windows down each side and the Cher moving underneath it. Nothing else in the Loire is built like this, and it is the reason the standard admission earns its nineteen euros before you have seen a single other room.
Built 1576, inaugurated 1577
Catherine de’ Medici put the gallery up on Diane’s bridge and opened it the following year, fifty-odd years after the house itself. That is the operator’s dating, from the leaflet handed over with every ticket.
The bridge came first, and it was Diane’s
Diane de Poitiers took formal ownership of Chenonceau in 1555 and commissioned Philibert de l’Orme to carry an arched bridge from the house to the far bank of the Cher, through the second half of the 1550s. From that point the building had a foot on both banks, and everything famous about it follows from that one decision.
Then Henri II died in 1559 and Catherine de’ Medici forced Diane to exchange Chenonceau for Chaumont. What Catherine built, she built on Diane’s bridge. The most famous room in the Loire is one woman’s gallery on another woman’s foundation, and the rivalry is the load-bearing part of the architecture. Both have their own page: Diane and Catherine.
And then the war
Here is the operator’s own leaflet, word for word:
“The Cher materialized the demarcation line. The castle’s entrance was in occupied territory (right bank). The gallery’s south door provided access to the left bank, allowing the Resistance to move many people to free territory.”
Read it twice. The entrance was in occupied France. The south door was in the free zone. Between them: sixty metres of Renaissance floor, eighteen windows, and a river.
A building that is a bridge became a border crossing. This is not a legend somebody attached to a handsome room. It is published by the family that owns the place, in the leaflet handed to every visitor with a ticket. It is the reason this site exists, and it is why not one of the pictures on it is captioned as this gallery.
It was the second time the room had been put to work. In the First World War it held a military hospital, and 2,254 wounded soldiers were treated there to 31 December 1918. The war years has both stories in full.
Standing in it
The gallery comes late in the operator’s route, after the Library and before the stairs down to the kitchens in the piers below. Windows on both long sides, water underneath in both directions. Nobody walks it without stopping halfway. The middle of the room is the middle of the river, and for a while the middle of the river was the edge of a country.
Look down, then look up. The kitchens are inside the piers holding this floor up — the kitchens page — so the two most unusual rooms in the building are one structure, seen from opposite ends.
Read on
- The hospital, and the demarcation line.
- The whole building sequence, 1513 to 1577.
- Where the gallery falls on the route.
- The six women who built and kept it.
Frequently asked questions
How long is the gallery at Chenonceau?
60 metres long and 6 metres wide, with eighteen windows, per the operator’s own guide leaflet — the printed one handed over with the ticket.
Why is the château built over a river?
Because Diane de Poitiers commissioned a bridge from the house to the far bank of the Cher in the 1550s, and Catherine de’ Medici later built a gallery on top of it, finished in 1576 and inaugurated in 1577.
Was Chenonceau used to escape occupied France?
The operator’s own leaflet says the Cher materialized the demarcation line, that the castle’s entrance was in occupied territory on the right bank, and that the gallery’s south door gave access to the left bank, allowing the Resistance to move many people to free territory.