Château de Silière et son jardin

This pleasant, high-walled, one-room, three-hectare estate is located in a place called Silière (from the Latin Salinaria = marshy place; "en Salières" in 1247). It was built in 1659 for Nicolas Méat, councillor at the Bailliage and Presidial Court of Langres.
The château features a garden facade with two pavilions overlooking a vast, well-ordered garden (known as "à la française") rising up the hillside. Here's how it was described in 1684: it's a place "adorned with fountains, espaliers and trellises; on the right is the menagerie, on the left an orchard, with the pavilion at the far end; the layout is so beautiful that, on opening the door, you discover the full depth of this beautiful stay and an infinite number of waters that gush out from the water table to the courtyard in different ways, where art, combined with nature, finds something to satisfy curiosity .... the garden has dissimilar beauties: some are natural, others artificial. The canal that runs the length of the middle alley, interspersed with waterfalls, is of such pleasing variety that you can't leave it to visit the other beauties of the alleyways, grottoes, cabinets, flowerbeds and other canals of such lively water that you can see all the way to the bottom.
After belonging for many years to the Méat family, the château came under the ownership of other Langroise families: Le Picard, Raphaël Gaucher who called himself "Gaucher de Sillières" around 1740, Guillaume Gousselin in 1757 and M. Donzé in 1783. In 1812, it was bought at auction by François Bertrand (brother of Langres sculptor Antoine-Henri Bertrand), who passed it on to his daughter Zilia, wife of Langres lawyer Pierre Jacquinot, and then to his granddaughter Marie Jacquinot, who married imperial prosecutor Nicolas-Augustin Massin de Pressigny. The estate then passed successively to Etienne Massin, Jacques Massin, and finally Pierre and Christiane Massin, who have looked after it with passion since 1972, before passing it on to their daughter, Isabelle Sauvegrain, in 2012.
The ensemble is most remarkable for its French-style garden, created in the late 17th century and said by family tradition to have been designed by Le Nôtre or one of his pupils.
The garden suffered greatly during the French Revolution and the Second World War, after which the statues had to be replaced and hornbeams replanted. Pierre Massin, who has tended this centuries-old garden, which came into his family in 1812, with great passion and happiness, saw in the ornamentation of the Greek mythological statuary, "an accompaniment to a highly symbolic path of light" in a gradual ascent towards the statue of the Sun King enthroned at the very top of the grand allée.