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Origin and history

The castle of Maine, located in the current 14th arrondissement of Paris, was originally a mansion or small castle named Fantaisie, built around 1730. Unlike a local legend, he never belonged to the Duke of Maine, but was the successor property of Élie Catherine Fréron (1766-1778), literary critic in conflict with Voltaire, then of the Marquis Louis-Justin Talaru (1818-1832), minister under the Restoration. The estate, surrounded by a 12 hectare park and five mills, was enlarged and embellished by its owners before being confiscated as a national property in 1832.

The main entrance to the castle was at 142 rue du Château, with an alley leading to the current Asseline street. Its park spread between the streets of the Château, Didot, Raymond-Losserand and Pernety, in a rural area then called Petit-Montrouge, southern part of Montrouge. Urbanized from the 1840s, this territory was annexed to Paris in 1860. The castle, with a 25-metre façade and a living area of 850 m2 (ground floor and three floors), was gradually dismantled after 1842, its last traces disappearing in 1898.

Pierre Sauvage (officer at the Monnaie de Paris), the first identified owner, gave the estate in 1736 to Pierre Mars, prosecutor in Parliament. Purchased by Fréron in 1766, the castle was enlarged by a chapel and renamed Fantasy. After the ruinous death of Fréron in 1776, the estate passed into several hands, including those of banker Charles de Puirieux, before being acquired in 1818 by Talaru. The latter housed ministers at large during the Revolution of 1830, causing his confiscation.

In 1842 the wine merchant Alexandre-Marie Coüesnon purchased the remaining 4 hectares and rented part of the park to geographer Jean-Léon Sanis to install a georama (damaged by fire in 1844). After Coüesnon's death in 1857, his son Louis-Victor tried to lot the estate, but the project was interrupted by his death in 1872. The last heirs sold the ruins in 1898 to the Tram Company, which built a depot demolished in the 1980s for the ZAC Didot.

The area, marked by quarries and mills (such as the Mill of Love, demolished in 1916), became an unhealthy island in the 20th century. No reliable graphic representation of the castle remains, but descriptions allowed a 3D reconstruction. The remains of the park and outbuildings disappeared with the urban transformations of the 14th arrondissement.

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