Photo : Thor19 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Château de Montgermont
The first Château de Montgermont, at Pringy in the Seine-et-Marne, was a fortified manor with a main building and two wings, surrounded by ditches and flanked by seven towers, only two of which survived in 1670. In the Middle Ages the seigneury had its own 13th-century church north-west of the château, fully restored at the end of the 17th century by Adam de Montgermont; in 1788 Montgermont was joined to the parish of Pringy.
In 1789-1790 Jean-Armand-Louis de Gontaut-Biron commissioned the architect Soufflot le Romain to remove its feudal appearance: the right wing and two towers were demolished. In the 19th century Aimé de Gontaut-Biron had the left wing taken down and a gallery and horseshoe staircase built on the main façade. At the end of the 19th century the Poulain family added two projecting wings and two corner towers, one round and one hexagonal. The whole is a model of the neo-Louis XIII style.
