Andrei Smirnov

A visit to Château de La Motte-Tilly is like being a guest of some very pleasant, if unfamiliar people. Here you will be told about the life of the house, the objects that have come out of use, the people who lived here or are depicted in the portraits, and the old print books (as if just to keep you occupied while dinner is being served).

This is the atmosphere that the last owner, marquise de Maillé, wished to preserve at the castle. In the early 1970s, she transferred the estate and the park of over 1,000 hectares to the French State as she had no direct heirs left.

This was a perfect solution to preserve the interiors and furnishings that the marquise and her father had spent dozens of years on (re)creating and not let history repeat itself at the end of the 18th century when, following the death of the manor's founder, the last Minister of Finance under Louis XV, and the ensuing Revolution, the castle fell into disrepair for more than a century.

Now this mid-18th-century "hunting lodge" together with the park makes a very pleasant impression, so I think Colin Firth and Miloš Forman spent a wonderful time here in the late 1980s working on the film "Valmont".