In the Galaure valley, a stone palace built in a kitchen garden from 1879 to 1912

History

Joseph Ferdinand Cheval was born on 19 April 1836 at Charmes-sur-l’Herbasse, a village near Hauterives, into a poor farming family. He trained as a baker and was sworn in as a postman in 1867. In 1878 he was given a permanent post as rural postman at the Hauterives office, on the Tersanne round, some thirty kilometres a day. The same year he married his second wife, Claire-Philomène Richaud.

On 19 April 1879, near Tersanne, he tripped over an oddly shaped stone and put it in his pocket. He went back the next day, found more, and from then on brought them home from his rounds in a wheelbarrow. He built in his kitchen garden, with stones, shells and lime mortar. According to the Mérimée database, the site grew as he bought four plots of land. The first piece was the Source of Life fountain on the east front; that front, dated 1899, took him twenty years.

He planned an Egyptian tomb in it where he and his wife would be buried, and dropped the idea for want of official permission. His daughter Alice, born on 11 October 1879, died in 1894 at fifteen. North-east of the Palace, the Villa Alicius was built with a mason’s help, between 1893 and 1895 according to Mérimée; Cheval moved in with his wife in 1896, the year he retired. A belvedere went up facing the north front around 1906. The Palace was finished in 1912, and the north front records the tally: 10,000 days, 93,000 hours, 33 years.

In 1914 Cheval bought a plot in the village cemetery and built his own tomb there, the Tomb of Silence and Endless Rest, over eight years; he completed it at 86. He died on 19 August 1924. His two granddaughters took over the running of the Palace, and caretakers moved into the villa.

The Palace was listed as a historic monument by order of 23 September 1969, at the instigation of André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, as a work of naive art. In 1984 one granddaughter left her share to the commune; the other sold hers ten years later. Since 1994 the whole site has belonged to Hauterives. An order of 19 March 2010 added the facades and roofs of the Villa Alicius and its outbuilding, the shed, the belvedere, the boundary wall and the ground of plots AS 125 and AS 126. The tomb was listed on 23 May 2011.

Updated 26 October 2026