Montretout is from French Montre Tout, meaning respectively “show all”, in reference to the estate’s location at the top of a hill, overlooking the Seine and Paris.

Philippe d'Orléans, brother of King Louis XIV, granted the land to the nuns of the Order of Saint Ursula, who stayed there until the French Revolution.

[1] Madame de Pompadour owned a property on the Montretout estate; it was bought by Charles André Pozzo di Borgo, the Russian ambassador to France.

From 1896 to 1899, one of his descendants, Duke Pozzo di Borgo, had the house dismantled, transported and rebuilt and expanded by the architect Louis Dauvergne on the estate of Dangu in Normandy, which he had acquired in 1884.

[2] During the 1870–1871 Siege of Paris, the French troops evacuated the plateau above the village of Saint-Cloud which was occupied by a fortification, La Redoute de Montretout.