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Montgobert

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Château de Montgobert
Château de Montgobert

Montgobert (French pronunciation: [mɔ̃ɡɔbɛʁ]) is a commune in the Aisne department in Hauts-de-France in northern France. It is situated 9.7 km from Villers-Cotterêts, 15.3 km from Vic-sur-Aisne, 94 km from Paris, 113 km from Amiens and 180 km from Lille.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Montgobert (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Montgobert
Allée du Château, Soissons

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 49.3078 ° E 3.1492 °
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Allée du Château

Allée du Château
02600 Soissons
Hauts-de-France, France
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Château de Montgobert
Château de Montgobert
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Château de Montgobert
Château de Montgobert

The Château de Montgobert in the midst of the Forest of Retz, near Soissons, in Montgobert, Aisne, Picardy, is a neoclassical French château that was built for Antoine Pierre Desplasses between 1768 and 1775 on the site of an ancient seigneurie.The château, which has the air of an English Palladian house, with four Ionic columns under an arced pediment, raised upon a high rusticated basement, was owned by Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister and wife of General Charles Leclerc who employed Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine to raise the house by adding an attic storey about 1798 and transformed the parterre into a terrace overlooking the park, which was re-landscaped in the naturalistic fashion, à l'anglaise, with meadows and clumps of trees and specimens against a background of woodland. He died in Saint Domingue, present-day Haiti in November 1802; his ashes were returned to Montgobert and a tomb in the park was designed by Fontaine and executed by a certain Laudier, but never finished. The outbuildings were constructed before 1831, when they appear on an estate map. The pair of entrance pavilions date after 1835. In the early twentieth century the office of Achille Duchêne reorganized the grand terrace: a semi-circular parterre was flanked by terraces connected by stairs. The château passed by inheritance to maréchal Davout, then to the Cambacérès and Suchet d'Albuféra families. Today the chateau belongs to the Cambacérès and Suchet d'Albuféra families. Since 1974 it has housed a collection of wooden ware ("treen") and some 3000 different tools.

Guards' Grave
Guards' Grave

Guards' Grave is a military cemetery near Villers-Cotterêts in northern France, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.In 1914, the British Expeditionary Force fought a rearguard action here during the Retreat from Mons. On 1 September, the British 4th (Guards) Brigade who were covering the withdrawal of 2nd Division, came into contact with the leading units of the German III Corps on the edge of woodland near Villers-Cotterêts. The brigade lost more than 300 men in the encounter, but were able to break away and continue the withdrawal.The cemetery in its original form was created by Lord Killanin (the brother of Lieut-Col. George Henry Morris, who had been killed in the action on 1 September) along with Lord Robert Cecil M.P. who was working for the Missing and Wounded Department of the Red Cross (and whose nephew Lieut. George Cecil is also buried here) the Lord Elphinstone, and the Revd. H. T. R. Briggs who had together discovered a makeshift grave when they visited in November 1914. It is thought that had been made by wounded British prisoners of war, with the help of local people. The group decided to have the bodies disinterred with the help of the town's doctor, Dr. Henri Moufflier, in an attempt to identify as many as they could, and after three days they found 98 men in total, though they were unable to identify 20 of them. They enlarged what they referred to as the 'pit' and reburied the men. This layout can still clearly be seen today, with the later headstones arranged around the edge. Originally the four officers were buried in a plot in the Villers-Cotterêts town cemetery, but after the war when the Commonwealth War Graves Commission carried out a reconciliation they were put back with the others in the Guards' Grave.Rudyard Kipling, who wrote the Irish Guards regimental biography of the First World War said it was "perhaps the most beautiful of all resting-places in France".