Built between 1631 and 1642 on the site of the former du Plessis family mansion, the château was at the heart of a several-hectare park located south of the current city.
With the permission of King Louis XIII, Richelieu created from scratch a walled town on a grid plan and, enclosing within its precincts the modest home of his childhood, an adjacent palace (the Château de Richelieu proper)[1] surrounded by an ornamental moat and large imposing walls enclosing a series of entrance courts towards the town and, on the opposite side, grand axially planned formal vista gardens of parterres and gravel walks, a central circular fountain, and views reaching to an exedra cut in the surrounding trees and pierced by an avenue in the woodlands extending to the horizon.
After a period of decline, the Château de Richelieu was dismantled in the 19th century — not for any great political reasons, but by an estate agent.
In 1639, the then 17-year-old count palatine Carl of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, the future king Charles X of Sweden, visited the at the time not yet finished chateau Richelieu.
The side of the courtyard leading to the entrance of the chateau is not built as high as the other three but has an open gallery on the roof.
All these chambers are lined with silken tapestries, some of them embroidered, well dressed, and the beds decorated with curtains and bedcovers in the best possible way, to make it all wonderful and splendid.
The eighth room is “le Cabinet” of the king, full of beautiful landscape paintings and very rare, given to the cardinal by the duke of Mantua.
Here are also many emblems or proverbs, among them the following: 1 Erit altera merces, 2 Ultima meta, 3 In aeternum, 4 Aliena meispra fero, 5 Nec momentum sine linea, 6 Non uritnisi leasus, 7 Minimum pressus punget, 8 Beatus sare quam accipere, 9 Eminius prospicienti nihil novum, 10 Virtutis honors praemium.
On the mantlepiece stands a bust of Julius Caesar, the head made of porphyry and the body of alabaster.
The cardinal has also made a zoo here, 4 miles in circumference, and is building a church so that this will in time become a most lovely place.
Through the arched central gateway the visitor entered the vast basse cour, with common stabling for a hundred horses in a flanking courtyard to the left, with barns and lodgings for gardeners and estate workers, and to the right, an identical courtyard with elite stabling, bakehouse and other offices.
Continuing along the axis one passed through a smaller cour d'honneur enclosed by matching ranges each with a central dome and end pavilions.
Beyond was the rectangular moat that surrounded the château itself, with its inner court, reached across a central drawbridge leading to the grand domed gatehouse, a handsome structure with Hercules and Mars in niches on either side and a statue of Louis XIII above, with a statue of Fame crowning the dome.
The main corps de logis was domed; its left-hand range enclosed the modest house of Richelieu's youth.
The garden front looked onto a square parterre that was itself surrounded by moats and reached by a central bridge.