Le Chêne du Tiers

Was this tree, several hundred years old between 250 and 300 years old, used to dispense justice? Did it announce the ownership of the "Fortress of the Third Estate", a veritable "Devil's Castle" where a sort of local Bluebeard would reside, holding to ransom the travellers and boatmen of Port Thareau?
Was it planted by representatives of the Third Estate to celebrate the French Revolution? Or was it simply an oak tree on a property line that always belonged to the other party, the third party?
In March 2007, an 11-year-old girl from Seine et Marne who was visiting Montambert sent us her own version of the tree's history.
Attached is a copy of an old postcard. It's impossible to read the date of cancellation on this card, so we've done some research to date the stamp to 1921, and given the size of the oak, it's undoubtedly several hundred years old.
An anecdote about the appropriation and attachment of the inhabitants to this oak: one morning in 1992, at my home, I received telephone calls from the inhabitants of the oak of the third calling out to me as follows: "I got into my car to ask them what right they had to touch the oak, and was told in no uncertain terms that the oak belonged to the ONF and that they were looking after it.