The world of Paris in a museum
This Haussmannian Paris is that of Marcel Proust, the universally known author ofIn Search of Lost Time. Born in 1871, died at 51, the writer who dissected the world fauna of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, left bank, is the double product of this time. Firstly because his life took place in the west of Paris upset by the work of Haussmann, the quadrilateral includes between Auteuil, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Parc Monceau and the Bois de Boulogne. Then because many of its characters, like the Duchess of Guermantes, a figure of the old aristocracy, will settle in the new Second Empire hotels on the right bank. Tribute to the Parisian writer, the Carnavalet museum has reconstructed the room on rue Hamelin which he occupied when he died. The plunge into his intimacy is poignant: walls covered with cork sheets to deaden the noise of a city whose evenings he roams, brass bed in which he wrote some 4,000 pages of The research, the bars marked by the fumigations prescribed to cure his chronic asthma. A nod to modernity: the theatrophone which allows him, from his bed, to listen to the first performances of Pelléas and Mélisande of Debussy or Rite of Spring by Stravinsky at the Paris Opera.
First residence of Jacques des Ligneris, president of the Parliament of Paris, the hotel completed in 1560 took the name of “Carnavalet” by deformation of “Kernevenoy”, the name of the next occupant, widow of the first squire of the king Henry II. Enlarged by François Mansart, a pioneer of classical architecture, inhabited by Madame de Sévigné and finally connected to the neighboring residence, the Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, the museum of the history of the capital will never be able to enclose all of Paris. in the same building. But by showing the creativity of its craftsmen and its writers, from the Renaissance to the Belle Epoque, it gives the keys to the influence of the City of Light. Hemingway was right: Paris is a party!