In 1833, Louis-Julien Pantin de La Guère bought Briord from a ruined Dubois-Violette. Seventeen years later, his daughter Mathilde brought the estate as a dowry to Count Pelet de Lautrec.
The Pantin de La Guère held Briord for only one generation. Their passage was no less decisive: it was through them that the estate changed families, not by sale, but by marriage.
On 4 November 1833, Louis-Julien Pantin de La Guère, husband of Marie-Zénobie Jaillard de La Maronnière, bought Briord and its one hundred and seventy-five hectares from Jean-Anne-Thomas Dubois-Violette, ruined by a second bankruptcy. The price: 500,000 francs.
The alliance with the Jaillard de La Maronnière connected the Pantin de La Guère to the Nantes magistracy — a milieu of the robe, of property and of tradition, quite distinct from the great merchants who preceded them at Briord.
After the turbulence of the Dubois-Violette era — the speculations, the hazardous agronomic experiments, the successive bankruptcies — the estate knew under the Pantin de La Guère a calmer period.
That was no small thing. Briord needed to catch its breath. The château, built sixty years earlier, crossed the century without great upheaval. The lands were maintained, the métairies worked.
17 June 1850 is the date that counts. That day, Mathilde Pantin de La Guère, daughter of Louis-Julien and Marie-Zénobie, married a young Martinican Saint-Cyr officer: Michel-Adolphe Pelet de Lautrec.
Briord entered the marriage portion. The estate would not be sold; it would be handed down, through the dowry, to a new family.
The estate passed definitively to the Pelet de Lautrec on the death of the Pantin de La Guère parents: Louis-Julien in 1860, Marie-Zénobie in 1864.
Thus ended, quietly, the passage of the Pantin de La Guère at Briord. They would neither build nor destroy. They would hand on — which, in the history of an estate, is not the least of roles.
What follows belongs to the most flamboyant, the most litigious, the most novelistic of the masters of Briord: Count Pelet de Lautrec.