Less than five miles beyond La Charité, just off the marvellously ruler-straight N151 road, running North-East to Auxerre, is the castle of Passy-les-Tours. An impressive ruin, almost lost in trees, it is the towers of the castle which give Passy its suffix.
Remodelled in the late fourteenth century, Passy was a stronghold of Jean de Chevenon, a counsellor to Charles VI of France, and reputedly one of the wealthiest of his courtiers. Unhappily for the family, Jean’s son, Guillaume de Chevenon, perished at Agincourt, leaving his widow, Héliette Girard, vulnerable to the many ‘vultures’ which hovered over France in the 1420s. Numerous court cases were begun and rumbled on, unresolved, over debts owed by the Chevenons.
With the renewal of a three-way war between the English, their Burgundian allies, and the French supporters of the ‘disinherited’ Dauphin, this was, in any case, disputed territory. In June 1422, a Dauphinist army under Tanneguy du Châtel struck at La Charité, as a vital river-crossing for their campaign in the Duke of Burgundy’s Nivernais lands.
La Charité succumbed but the castle at Passy held out, garrisoned by the soon-to-be notorious soldier of fortune, Perrinet Gressart, with twenty men-at-arms and ten archers. Of course, the balance of war was to swing again and La Charité fell again to Gressart at the end of 1423.
For the next fifteen years Gressart ran his unofficial fiefdom from Passy, controlling a vast swathe of land, from which he derived, according to contemporary accounts, over one hundred thousand gold livres tournois. Such taxation, or extortion, often known as appatissements, was part protection money and part payment in kind from a ruler unable to offer regular salaries for hired troops. In any case, it represented great wealth for Gressart and his kind.
On Gressart’s death in 1438, the castle passed to his nephew, another successful soldier of fortune, Francois de Surienne (of whom we shall hear more), although Gressart’s widow, Hugette de Corvol, appears to have remained in residence and control.
The castle was severely damaged during the Wars of Religion, at the end of the sixteenth century, and was acquired in a ruinous state by Jean Gravier, the Marquis de Vergennes, in in 1782. Gravier, sometime ambassador to Switzerland, Venice and Portugal, did not live at Passy and, ultimately, was guillotined with his eldest son, in 1794. The castle is still in private hands but recognised as an historical monument and occasionally opened for fêtes and pageants.
The grandeur of the site can readily be appreciated, however, from a small, gravelly lay-by on the Route Jean de Chevenon, which becomes the Rue de Vergennes in Passy-les-Tours, and (travelling East) joins the N151 by way of the Rue du Chateau. Where, though is the Route Perrinet Gressart, or Rue Surienne?