Come and discover this castle listed as Historical Monuments in 1987 for its fireplace, its pavilion, its tower, its dormers, its elevations and its interior decor.
Come and discover this castle listed as Historical Monuments in 1987 for its fireplace, its pavilion, its tower, its dormers, its elevations and its interior decor.
Jules Verne’s maternal family, whose hundredth anniversary of his death was celebrated in 2015, came from a lineage of Poitevin hobereaux. Without their wealth, the history of literature might have been changed.
All the biographers of Jules Verne, who died a little over a century ago, on March 24, 1905, will tell you...the author of "Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers" was born into a bourgeois family in Nantes, particularly well-off. If the father of Jules Verne, admitted by the courts, ensured good incomes for his family, the real ease came rather from the mother of the writer, born Sophie Allotte de La Fuÿe. Sophie came from a family of wealthy merchant shipowners from Nantes, recently arrived from Poitou where they had made up the bulk of their fortune in previous centuries.
The first owner of Jules Verne’s ancestors is Alexandre Allotte de La Fuÿe, born in 1726 in Martaizé (Vienna), the great-grandfather of the novelist is the son of a rich merchant of Loudun. In 1761, Alexandre married a Nantes heiress, Geneviève Cormier, daughter of a merchant, and sold the family castle of La Fuÿe, which allowed him to settle as a merchant shipowner on the port of Nantes.
We are under Louis XV and the very immoral but very profitable triangular trade (purchase of slaves on the African coasts, resale of «ebony wood» in the West Indies and return to Nantes with exotic products) is working hard.
The castle of La Fuÿe, bought by Paul Allotte, father of Alexander, remained only ten years property of the relatives of Jules Verne. The term «Family Castle» is however not usurped, since the manor-house had been built in the fifteenth century by N.Allott, head of the Scottish guard of Louis XI, who had given him in fief the lands of La Fuÿe. This Allott, having added a French «e» to its name, is the oldest French ancestor known to Jules Verne.
Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Jules remains very close to his maternal family. He was born on Feydeau Island, in Nantes, at the home of his grandmother, Marie-Sophie Allotte de La Fuÿe née Guillochet de la Peyrière, and lives in the admiration of his navigating uncles, officers or scientists who inspired his adventure novels. One of them, his great-uncle Prudent Allotte de La Fuÿe, appears under the features of a character of «Robur the Conqueror»
This attachment to the Allottes, however, does not seem to have pushed Jules Verne back to the family’s Poitevine lands. He did not hesitate to co-sign an «Illustrated geography of France and its colonies» in which the paragraph devoted to Loudun, the city of his ancestors, is full of errors!
Today, the greatness of the Allottes, remains in the village of Martaizé a bourgeois house, and, a few kilometers away, the magnificent Castle of La Fuÿe. Having served as a stable and stable for decades, La Fuÿe was bought and restored by Mr. and Mrs.Jacques Lallemand who piously maintain the memory of the Allottes.
Des Allotte, whose fortune had enabled Jules Verne to neglect his studies of law, to which he had pushed him, in spite of himself his father’s jurist, to devote himself entirely to his passions: science, travel and literature. It is not nothing.
