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Updated: May 6, 2025
The park of Maintenon is in every way admirable, with its pelouse, its great border of trees, its waterways and more than thirty bridges. Jean Cottereau himself planned the first vegetable and fruit garden, or potager, the same whose successor is the delight of the dwellers at Maintenon to-day.
Consequently, it was the voice of the priesthood which roused Brittany against the Republic, and sent thousands of men, five years before this history begins, to the support of the first Chouannerie. The brothers Cottereau, whose name was given to that first uprising, were bold smugglers, plying their perilous trade between Laval and Fougeres.
Under the entrance vault are doors on either side giving access to the living apartments of the rez-de-chaussée. In the inner courtyard is to be found the most exquisite architectural detail of the whole fabric, the tower which encloses the monumental stairway, to which entrance is had by a portal which is a veritable Gothic jewel. In the tympan of this portal, as in the dormer windows, is the device of Jean Cottereau, except in this case it is much more elaborate a Saint Michel and the dragon, surrounded by a "semis de coquilles" bearing the escutcheons of the chatelain d'argent
I commanded five hundred men during the late war. Since we have taken up arms again I have raised a thousand heads as hard as mine for the service of the king. It is now seven years that I have risked my life in the good cause; I don't blame you, but I say that the laborer is worthy of his hire. Now, to begin with, I demand that I be called Monsieur de Cottereau.
The armorial device of Jean Cottereau three unlovely lizards blazoned on a field of silver is still to be seen sculptured on the two towers flanking the entrance portal which to-day lacks its old drawbridge before mentioned.
When volunteers were called out to resist them, men with black cockades went about interrupting the enrolment, and declaring that no man should take arms, except to deliver the king. Their mysterious leader, Cottereau, the first to bear the historic name of Jean Chouan, was La Rouerie's right hand.
Entrance was only over a deep moat spanned by a drawbridge. Jean Cottereau made his acquisition of the domain towards 1490 and immediately planned a new scheme of being for the old fortress which, according to a more esthetic conception, would thus be brought into the class of a luxurious residential chateau.
This façade is of the fifteenth century and on the tympan of the dormer windows one may still see the monogram of its builder, Cottereau. The drawbridge has been made way with, and the turrets over the portal have been bound together by a diminutive balcony of stone, which, while a manifest superfluity, is in no way objectionable.
There we find ourselves in the heart of the Morbihan; that is to say, in the region that gave birth to the Chouannerie. It was close to Laval, on the little farm of the Poiriers, that the four Chouan brothers were born to Pierre Cottereau and Jeanne Moyne. The name became that of a party.
"Ha! if the king would let me have my way, I'd answer for my thousand men; we'd soon wring their necks and be rid of them." "Monsieur de Cottereau," said the marquis, "I see some of our invited guests arriving.
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