"You will find on this panel the plan of the park and castle of Buffon, with its various curiosities to visit, here you are at the level of the access stairs to the terraces.
Between 1733 and 1742, the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon annexed the castle by engagement. The castle is abandoned and partly in ruins. Buffon undertakes many modifications. He fills the inside of the rampart with a mixture of earth and stones from the castle to create a single level. He lowered the ramparts and modified the Saint-Louis tower. It will not touch the Saint-Urse church or the Aubespin tower, a former master tower (dungeon) with a polygonal plan and whose apparatus has blocks with bosses scattered on the facades. At the top, battlements have been installed. Inside it has four rib-vaulted levels.
The park is laid out around fourteen terraces organized in French and Italian gardens. Trees, flowers and animals from different continents adorn the place.
Buffon settled partly at the Hôtel de Buffon, at the neighboring Petit Fontenet, and in the Tour Saint-Louis, which he lowered by one floor to install his library. Buffon also had a study built on the western rampart. He spent a large part of his day there writing his Histoire naturelle from 1749 to 1788, to which Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton and Bernard-Germain de Lacépède would collaborate, among others. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) will kneel in front of the entrance as a sign of admiration.
In 1870, the city of Montbard bought the castle, once again abandoned. The municipality turns it into a public park. Today the park is also an LPO reserve."