Located near Paris, the Champs-sur-Marne Castle was built at the beginning of the 18th century and designed as the very type of "French-style" leisure house, more focused on privacy and comfort. Property of successive influential people, it received many illustrious people: the philosophers and men of letters Voltaire, Diderot and d'Alembert (in the 1740s) then, at the turn of the 20th century, Marcel Proust, Isadora Duncan, Alphonse XIII of Spain and Paul Bourget. But its most illustrious guest was undoubtedly the Marquise de Pompadour who rented it between 1757 and 1759. Mistress of Louis XV, this woman of aesthetic and cultivated influence had an important role in the field of Arts and letters through active patronage and the defense of the great philosophers of the time.