An ode
to daring creativity
“Guard your dreams,
for wise men have none so beautiful
as those of fools!”
Enhancement
of the Château
The Chaix d’Est-Ange dynasty, owners of Lascombes from 1867 to 1923, worked for several generations to gradually extend what is now one of the most sumptuous châteaux in the region.
In 1882, Gustave Gaspard commissioned the architect Louis Michel Garros – who also designed the fountain in the Place du Parlement in Bordeaux – to extend the château and redesign the façade in its current poetic style.
The President
of the Bar and the poet
His father, Gustave Louis, was a leading figure in the Second Empire, notably as Grand Bâtonnier (Head of the Paris Bar) and Vice-Chairman of the Council of State. In 1857, ten years before he took charge of Lascombes, in his role as a barrister, he delivered one of the greatest defences of artistic audacity, at the trial of his client Charles Baudelaire, accused of insulting public decency by the prosecutor Ernest Pinard:
Plea by Mr Gustave Louis Chaix d’Est-Ange
on the first day of Charles Baudelaire’s trial
for his collection Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857.
“Baudelaire is not only a great artist and a profound and passionate poet to whose talent the honourable representative of the public ministry wishes himself to pay tribute.
He is more than that: he is an honest man, and that’s why he is a committed artist.
He has meditated on his work for a long time; he has carried it, he has matured it in his mind, with love, with the same tenderness that a woman carries a child in her womb…”
— Mr Gustave Louis Chaix d’Est-Ange
The original work by Baudelaire – for whom wine was a major literary theme – was suppressed and not republished until 1949, reflecting the slow evolution of morals and the long road towards freedom of expression.