This sunny room overlooks the garden and could have welcome Antoine Le Picard de Phélippeaux (1767-1799) when he took refuge in the Hôtel de Panette in 1795. A Royalist French artillery officer, he started an insurrection in Berry in 1795.
Antoine Le Picard de Phelippeaux was born in 1767 in Vienne and died in 1799 in Saint-Jean-d'Acre. He was an officer in the royal artillery, like his father before him. He was a pupil of the Pontlevoy Royal Military School. Antoine de Phelippeaux was Napoleon Bonaparte's fellow student and rival at the Royal Military School in Paris in 1785. According to the myth, Sergeant Major Henry-René-Marie Picot de Peccaduc put himself between Bonaparte and Phelippeaux to prevent them from kicking each other, and then consequently getting kicked by the both of them! In 1789 he joigned the Besancon regiment, siding with the Duke of Enghien in 1791 in the army of emigrants. In 1792 he participated in the battles of Valmy and Jemmapes. In 1795, Antoine infiltrated France and created the spectacular escape of William Sidney Smith from the Temple prison that took place in 1798. On April 2, 1796, Phelippeaux seized Sancerre with 2,000 men. Arrested on April 9, he was taken to Bourges from where he escaped, hiding at the Hôtel de Tristan (which will become the Hôtel de Panette). He will then join Paris and will hide from castle to castle, protected by his royalist friends. On April 24, 1798, Smith was released by an order signed by the Minister of Marine and Colonies. A few hours later people will realize that it was false one, bought for 60,000 gold francs by Phelippeaux himself, and delivered by fake gendarmes. In 1799, he joined Djezzar Pasha in Saint-Jean-d'Acre, where he made a powerful contribution to the defense of the city against General Bonaparte. He died of the plague or exhaustion in 1799.
