Château de Bagatelle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Château de Bagatelle is a small château in the Bois de Boulogne in the XVIe arrondissement of Paris. There is also a Château de Bagatelle located near Abbeville in northern France.

[edit] History

The château was initially built as a small hunting lodge built for the Maréchal d'Estrées in 1720. Bagatelle from the Italian bagattella, means a trifle, or decorative thing. In 1775, the Comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's brother, purchased the property. The Comte soon had the existing house torn down with plans to rebuild. Famously, Marie-Antoinette wagered against the Comte, her brother-in-law, that the new château could not be completed within three months. The Comte engaged the neoclassical architect François-Joseph Bélanger to design the building that remains in the park today. The Comte won his bet, completing the house in sixty-three days. It is estimated that the project, which came to include manicured gardens, cost over two million livres.

In 1777 a party was thrown in the recently completed house in honour of Louis XVI and the Queen. The party featured a new table game featuring a slender table and cue sticks, which players used to shoot ivory balls up an inclined playfield with fixed pins. The table game was dubbed "Bagatelle" by the Count and shortly after swept through France, evolving into various forms which eventually culminated in the modern pinball machine.

Following the Revolution and the Napoleonic era, Bagatelle became the property of Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford in 1835,^[1] and contained the largest part of his extensive collection of French paintings, sculptures, furniture and works of decorative art, most of which went to form the Wallace Collection, London. Bagatelle underwent five years of redecorating and extensions, and then Lord Hertford did not reside in it until 1848.

Like most of his unentailed property, Bagatelle was left to his illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace on Lord Hertford's death in 1870, as his entailed property and his title passed to a distant cousin. Bagatelle was acquired from his heir Sir John Murray-Scott by the City of Paris.

In the Bagatelle Gardens, created by Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, the Commissioner of Gardens for the city of Paris, around the Chateau de Bagatelle is the site of the annual Concours international de roses nouvelles de Bagatelle, an international competition for new roses run by the City of Paris in June of each year.