Here is the Chateau de Lamartine, not a tourist sight by any means, at least not an over-done one, but a shrine as worthy of contemplation and admiration as many another more grand and more popular.
Seated snugly at the foot of a wooded slope, the chateau, flanked with two great towers, lifts its serrated sky-line proudly above the reddish, ochre-washed walls (a colour dear to the folk of the Mâconnais) high above the level of the roofs of the town below.
A more massive square tower sets further to the rear, and a tourelle, with a pointed candle-snuffer roof, accentuates the militant aspect of the edifice, though indeed its claims rest entirely on the arts of peace to the exclusion of those of war.
Here, in the family chateau, Alphonse-Marie-Louis-de-Lamartine passed the happiest years of his life. This was at a time when the pomp of power which he afterwards tasted as Minister of Foreign Affairs, after the abdication of Louis Philippe, had no attraction for him.
“Il est sur la colline
Une blanche maison,
Une tour la domine,
Un buisson d’aubepine
Est tout son horizon.”
As Lamartine himself wrote: “Nothing here will remind one of luxury; it is simply the aspect of a great farm where the owners live the simple life in a great block of a silent dwelling.” These words describe the Chateau de Lamartine very well to-day.
Saint-Pont and the Chateau de Lamartine are well worth half a day of anyone who is found at Mâcon and not hard pressed to move on.
Near Saint-Pont is the ancient Chateau de Noble, belonging, in 1558, to Nicolas de Pisa, and, in 1789, to Claude de la Beaune. It is not a splendid structure in any architectural sense, but a most curious and appealing one. Its chief distinction comes from its two pointed coiffed towers, one at either end of a high sloping gable.
Repairs and restorations made since the Revolution have deprived it of the ancient ramparts which once entirely surrounded it, but the romantic and curious aspect of the main body of the structure, and those all-impressive, svelt, sky-piercing towers, make it seem too quaint to be real. Certainly no more remarkable use of such adjuncts to a seigneurial chateau has ever been made than these towers. Here they are not massive, nor particularly tall, but their proportions are seemingly just what they ought to be. They are, at any rate, entirely in accord with the rest of the structure, and that is what much modern architecture lacks.