Château L’Évangile: The Ducasse Era
Paul Chaperon married Françoise Louise Marie Lacaze in February 1848, and they had two children, Jeanne-Marie and Anne-Marie Louise. When Chaperon died, at the turn of the century, the running of the estate passed first to his widow and elder daughter Anne-Marie Louise. No doubt the daughter’s husband, a gentleman named Jean-Louis Ducasse who she had married in 1866, was also called upon to help. The Ducasse family were well-known and well-connected; it was a Ducasse who had purchased a slice of the Figeac estate, thereby creating that which we know today as Château Cheval Blanc. And they had a hand in running a number of other estates, including the nearby Château Larcis-Ducasse, and it was a more distant relative who was responsible for Château Grand-Puy-Ducasse.
Tragically both Jean-Louis Ducasse and Anne-Marie-Louise Chaperon died before Anne-Marie’s mother, although not before they had given Françoise four grandchildren. And so Paul’s widow continued on running the estate until eventually it was passed to the grandchildren, three boys named Jean-Paul, Pierre Henri and Joseph François; there had been a fourth son, Emmanuel Jean, but he had died the year after his birth. Of the three survivors it was Jean-Paul who assumed control; he married Hélène Cash, the union bearing four children, three daughters Marguerite, Marie-Louise and Jacqueline, and one son Louis. Of these, it was the sole male heir who subsequently took on the property.
