After a few steps in the curved corridor, you come to the original door of the tower. This room in which you have just arrived is 4.25m in diameter and about 6m high.

This room was a storage for food supplies. Wine barrels, barley beer, a salt tub, sacs of legumes or grains… were kept here. Nevertheless, there was a larger and more convenient place to store foodstuff: the underground cellar beneath the Old-Hall was used to store the large quantity of supplies necessary to the seignior and his family’s service.

As for the yields from the estate, they were kept in the Lower Bailey, in purposely-built granaries and barns.

The 8m deep cistern provided drinking water in the castle together with the 30m deep well in the upper-bailey. It collected rain water from the pepperbox on this tower by means of a pipe hidden in the wall.

The privy was at the end of the corridor, it always is.

Look at the unfortunately damaged magnificent set of six consoles, or culs-de-lampe, representing a bestiary, except for a human face displaying a mysterious smile. The latter is either a monk or a peasant woman. Whichever you go for, your choice fits in the symbolic language of the consoles:

the cow and the calf are for adulthood and childhood

the billy goat and the lion symbolise strength and weakness (the predator and its prey)

the peasant woman is for life, when the chimera means death

or the monk symbolises religion, opposed to temptation, the devil.

Note the three arrow slits in the room, besides a fourth one in the corridor which defended a postern (a back door) in the curtain wall.

Note the only light well in this room.

The ceiling, as for all the rooms in the towers bar one, is a six-ribbed vault. Note the ogival wall-arches (arches divided by the ribs), and traces of the formwork used to build the jack arches; the keystone is made of limestone from Apremont, « showing five leaves folded in a crown » (Xavier Barbier de Montault, 1876).

The ribbed vault was added in a late XIII^th c. work campaign.

Take the stairs and go up 19 steps to the first floor. If you look up in the staircase, you will notice the uninterrupted corbel supporting the steps in the staircase.

 © March 2023