Château Figeac: André de Carle-Trajet
Strangely, although they inherited the relevant titles, the lands and vineyards at Figeac do not seem to have come to Vital and Élie. Instead it passed through the hands of Vital’s elder brother, the aforementioned François V de Carles, proprietor of the original Château Beauséjour, and then to his son Comte Jacques-Amédée de Carles (1724 – 1803), a military officer who held first the rank of maréchal de camp, and then général. He married Marie Rosaline Vacher (1773 – 1868) but the union had not produced any children, perhaps not surprising as it appears that his wife was nearly fifty years his junior. Thus at the time of his death there was no obvious heir, and both the Figeac and the Beauséjour estates were passed to Guillaume Arnaud André de Carle-Trajet (died 1825), seigneur of Peyrat. It is often written that André, as he is referred to, was a cousin of Jacques, although in truth the relationship was rather more distant than that. The two did share an ancestor, but it was at least four generations previous (five in the case of André), the great-great-grandfather of Jacques de Carles, François II de Carles (c.1571 – c.1654).
Sadly André’s tenure, while memorable for his construction of the modern-day château (pictured above) which replaced the previous Renaissance building erected by Raymond II de Cazes, was not the most successful. He fertilised the vineyards and planted higher-yielding varieties, and more unusually he turned away from the vine altogether at times, choosing to plant other crops such as grain, and even madder, just as Pierre-Elie Barry-Berthomieu did at Château Beauregard in Pomerol.
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