Église Saint-Michel

English translation

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History

The castle of Michel de Montaigne stood at a short distance from the church. Upon his death, in 1592, his widow, Françoise de La Chassagne, had his heart placed in the chapel of the church and his body taken to Bordeaux, to the church of the Feuillants. The Romanesque church consisted of a nave followed by a crossing square under a dome and a choir in the form of a half-barrel vault. The nave was re-vaulted in the 17th century. The south wall was opened, in the 16th century, with two arches. The dome of the crossing square dates from the first half of the 12th century. The dome results from a compromise between an octagon and a circle. Choir in hemicycle with half-barrel vault. Near the angle of the aisle, a baptistry was erected in the 18th century, a shell niche framed by two fluted pilasters supporting a pediment cut with volutes. The western façade opens through a 12th-century portal in which Saintongeais influence is found: four round-arched voussoirs with moulding decorated with leafwork scrolls between the first and second, and framing the fourth. They rest on eight small columns with crude capitals and toric astragals, whose abaci are decorated with a frieze of opposed saw-tooth pattern which extends to the buttress columns. The bases are moulded with a cavetto between two tori, on a base sculptured with a frieze of stars. The 12th-century walls are of regular ashlar coursing, while the later walls were rebuilt with irregular rubble stone.