Excerpt: 'Around and About Paris, Volume 1"

By Thirza Vallois
Iliad Books
Travel
286 pages

In this three-part series, Thirza Vallois gives readers a comprehensive look at the dazzling sights, energetic people and rich history of Paris. The following excerpt is taken from one of the walks Vallois designed for the Marais.

EXCERPT

Turn left into rue de Thorigny. At no 5 stands the Hôtel Aubert de Fontenay or Salé, now the Musée Picasso. Aubert de Fontenay was one of the King's partisans, who, from the 16th century on, were in charge of collecting his taxes and were later known as fermiers généraux (Farmers General). This privileged post enabled its holder to amass a fabulous fortune, but also placed him in a fragile position, between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a jealous despot (cf Louis XIV and Nicolas Fouquet) and a discontented populace. The people of Paris nicknamed Aubert de Fontenay's showy mansion 'l'hôtel salé' ('the salty townhouse'), because he had made his fortune largely through collecting the salt tax, but also because salé in colloquial French means expensive: Aubert, who was said to have started out as a lackey, went all out to impress his neighbours. However, like many others, he lost his fortune in the wake of Fouquet's downfall and died before the hôtel had been completed.

Other parvenus were more fortunate and it was not unusual to see them climb from the bottom all the way up the social ladder, as we are told by Molière in L'Ecole des Femmes: "I know a country fellow called Gros Pierre, who, not having any other property than a single piece of land, had a muddy ditch dug round it, and pompously called himself Monsieur de l'Isle." Or, as the great observer of the human animal, La Bruyère, summed it up succinctly in his Caractères: "Certain people go to bed as commoners and rise noble." Which was precisely what the maternal great-grandfather of the very noble Marquise de Sévigné did, a wealthy tax-collector by the name of Philippe de Coulanges, who had married his daughter into the very old feudal family of the Rabutins. The bridegroom, the Baron de Chantal, being ridden with debts, found the match to his interest, but the rest of the family did not appear at the wedding. Commenting on such mésalliances a few decades later, Madame de Sévigné said: "Il faut bien fumer ses terres" ("One does have to manure one's land").

After Aubert's death the Embassy of Venice rented the dazzling mansion with its richly decorated pediment and its imposing staircase, surrounded by Corinthian pillars, medallions and sculpted eagles - no effort was spared to dazzle all and sundry. Its fabulous wrought-iron balustrade is marked with the letters A for Aubert and C for Mademoiselle Chastelain, his wealthy wife, who had helped him rise in the world, but also made him a cuckold. When, a century later, the hôtel became the property of Leclerc de Juigné, the Archbishop of Paris, he laid a crimson carpet on the gorgeous staircase and covered up the nude sculptures on the walls.

The Revolution left the mansion disfigured beyond recognition. André Malraux, de Gaulle's Minister of Culture, passed a bill in August 1962 for the restoration of the Marais, thanks to which the mansion was saved from demolition. The same year it was bought by the City of Paris and leased to the state. After Picasso's death in 1973, it received the donations of his heirs, including paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, Douanier rousseay, Matisse and Braque from his private collection, along with some of his own works....

Turn right into rue de Sévigné, named after the most illlustrious inhabitant of the Marais, the Marquise de Sévigné. The Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-fargeau at no 29 was inhabited successively by four generations of the Le Peletier family, who also owned the domain of Saint-Frageau in Sologne. The last one, Louis-Michel, turned Republican during the Revolution, joined the Convention and voted for the death of the King. On 20 January 1793, on the eve of the King's execution, he was himself murdered by the King's bodyguard in Café Février, in the Galerie Valois of the Palais-Royal, to avenge his sovereign. The Hôtel is now an annex of the Musée Carnavalet. The historical library of Paris was located here until 1968, when it moved to the neighbouring Hôtel Lamoignon on rue Pavée (see 4th arrondissement).

Hôtel Carnavalet undoubtedly is one of the landmarks of the 3rd arrondissement, both as the museum of the history of Paris and as the most famous and most permanent of Madame de Sévigné's nine dwellings in the Marais, the one where she lived the last 20 years of her life. It was built in 1545 for the President of Parliament, Jacques de Lingeris, who was much in favour with FranÁois I, which accounts for the contribution of Jean Goujon, the King's official sculptor: the gorgeous bas-relief of the Seasons in the courtyard is his work. Coysevox's statue of the Sun King is obviously a later addition; having been miraculously rescued during the Revolution, it was transferred here from the Hôtel de Ville. The architecture, a blend of ornate Italian Renaissance and French formality, is characteristic of the reign of FranÁois I, who, in the wake of his Italian campaigns, sought to bridge the two cultures. These features are best seen from rue des Francs-Bourgeois, round the corner to the right (see below). In 1572, the hôtel became the property of Madame de Kernevenoy, when its name was distorted into Carnavalet. The Hôtel Carnavalet is also, it should be noted, the third oldest domestic monument in Paris, after the Hôtel de Sens (1475), and the Hôtel de Cluny (1485), respectively in the 4th and 5th arrondissements. The Renaissance Louvre was started only two years later.....

See related sites about TRAVEL

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.