he Pontbriant family made Montreal the castle it is today. They designed the
new chapel to honor the Holy Thorn taken by their grandfather from the corpse
of the English general Talbot, killed in the battle of Castillon (1453). The
chapel is rectangular, and is decorated with statues of the 12 apostles, an
exceptional example of popular, crude and naive art of the Renaissance statues
in Perigord. The chapel also contains a statue of the Virgin and Child, and two
funerary statues, one of François de Pontbriand and the other of his
first wife.
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laude de Pontbriant, the Lord of Montréal, cupbearer of the Dauphin,
was,on 3 October 1535, alongside Jacques Cartier on the banks of the Saint
Laurent River when the navigator gave his name to an Indian village which later
was to become the second largest French city in the world.
