Château de Rochecotte

Saint-Patrice (French pronunciation: [sɛ̃ patʁis] ) is a former commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France. On 1 January 2017, it was merged into the new commune Coteaux-sur-Loire.

Coteaux-sur-Loire (French pronunciation: [kɔto syʁ lwaʁ] , literally Hillsides on Loire) is a commune in the department of Indre-et-Loire, central France. The municipality was established on 1 January 2017 by merger of the former communes of Saint-Patrice (the seat), Ingrandes-de-Touraine and Saint-Michel-sur-Loire.

Rigny-Ussé (French pronunciation: [ʁiɲi yse]) is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France.

Ingrandes-de-Touraine (French pronunciation: [ɛ̃gʁɑ̃d də tuʁɛn], literally Ingrandes of Touraine) is a former commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France. On 1 January 2017, it was merged into the new commune Coteaux-sur-Loire.

Ussé is a castle in the Indre-et-Loire département, in France. The stronghold at the edge of the Chinon forest overlooking the Indre Valley was first fortified in the eleventh century by the Norman seigneur of Ussé, Gueldin de Saumur, who surrounded the fort with a palisade on a high terrace. The site passed to the Comte de Blois, who rebuilt it in stone. In the fifteenth century, the ruined castle of Ussé was purchased by Jean V de Bueil, a captain-general of Charles VII who became seigneur of Ussé in 1431 and began rebuilding it in the 1440s; his son Antoine de Bueil married in 1462 Jeanne de Valois, the biological daughter of Charles VII and Agnès Sorel, who brought as dowry 40000 golden écus. Antoine was heavily in debt and in 1455, sold the château to Jacques d’Espinay, son of a chamberlain to the Duke of Brittany and himself chamberlain to the king; Espinay built the chapel, completed by his son Charles in 1612, in which the Flamboyant Gothic style is mixed with new Renaissance motifs, and began the process of rebuilding the fifteenth-century château that resulted in the sixteenth-seventeenth century aspect of the structure to be seen today. In the seventeenth century Louis I de Valentinay, comptroller of the royal household, demolished the north range of buildings in order to open the interior court to the views over the parterre terrace, to a design ascribed to André Le Nôtre. Valentinay's son-in-law was the military engineer Vauban, who visited Ussé on numerous occasions. Charles Perrault, author of the versions of several of the most famous fairy tales known today, often visited the castle and was a guest there. He had the castle of Ussé in mind when writing "The Sleeping Beauty". Later, the castle passed to the Rohan. In 1802 Ussé was purchased by the duc de Duras; as early as March 1813, low-key meetings were held at Ussé among a group of Bourbon loyalists, who met to sound out the possibilities of a Bourbon Restoration: such men as Trémouille, duc de Fitzjames, the prince de Polignac, Ferrand, Montmorency and the duc de Rochefoucault attended. Here later François-René de Chateaubriand worked on his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe as the guest of duchesse Claire de Duras. In 1885 the comtesse de la Rochejaquelein bequeathed Ussé to her great-nephew, the comte de Blacas. Today the château belongs to his descendant Casimir de Blacas d' Aulps the 7th Duke of Blacas. Famed for its picturesque aspect, Ussé was the subject of a French railroad poster issued by the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans in the 1920s and was one of several that inspired Walt Disney in the creation of many of the Disney Castles. Ussé was classified as a monument historique in 1931 by the French Ministry of Culture.

Saint-Michel-sur-Loire (French pronunciation: [sɛ̃ miʃɛl syʁ lwaʁ], literally Saint Michel on Loire) is a former commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France. On 1 January 2017, it was merged into the new commune Coteaux-sur-Loire.

Bréhémont (French pronunciation: [bʁe.emɔ̃]) is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France.

Rivarennes (French pronunciation: [ʁivaʁɛn] ) is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France.

Les Essards (French pronunciation: [le.z‿ɛsaʁ] ) is a former commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France. On 1 January 2017, it was merged into the commune Langeais.

Saint-Benoît-la-Forêt (French pronunciation: [sɛ̃ bənwa la fɔʁɛ] ) is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France.

Restigné (French pronunciation: [ʁɛstiɲe]) is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France.

The Museum of Maurice Dufresne (in French: Musée Maurice-Dufresne) is a technological history museum located in the mill at Marnay, near the Château of Azay-le-Rideau, France. It has acquired numerous important objects displayed in vast buildings containing some 25 rooms. The museum pieces are presented thematically: agricultural machines, silk and textile industries, musketry, hydraulic power, etc. Born in 1930, Maurice Dufresne began his training as a blacksmith at the age of fourteen and joined the "Compagnons du Devoir", an organization of journeymen -craftsmen, to begin a tour of France, working for twenty different employers. In 1958, he created his own company in Villeperdue in the region Indre-et-Loire. He started out in the salvage business and began saving things which he thought worthy of placing later in his museum, thereby avoiding the destruction of part of the French heritage. Thirty years later, on 24 October 1992, the prefect, the notables of the region and the press inaugurated the Museum Maurice Dufresne in Marnay near Azay-le-Rideau, on the banks of the Indre river in an old mill on a site owned by Geoffroy de l'Ile in 1026, which later became a paper factory in the time of Balzac. The scrap dealer from Villeperdue, armed only with his enthusiasm, was able to create this amazing museum of collections of machines from a road roller to a hearse, from a copper sulfate sprayer to a Louis Blériot monoplane, and to present all of this in enjoyable surroundings. His museum today presents more than 3,000 machines in warehouses covering 10,000 m2. It has already attracted 600,000 visitors and 23 guestbooks are filled with comments from around the world. In the last few years, Maurice Dufresne has continually travelled between Marnay and Villeperdue, where 27 people run the medium-sized salvage business.