Musée Carnavalet: The Memory of Paris
Why is it significant?
Walk into the courtyard at 23 rue de Sévigné and meet a king: a bronze Louis the Fourteenth in Roman armour and a cascading wig, by the sculptor Antoine Coysevox. Around him rises a Renaissance mansion, its walls carved with reliefs of the four seasons.
Key Facts
| Place | Musée Carnavalet: The Memory of Paris |
|---|---|
| Address | 23 Rue de Sévigné, 75003 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85730, 2.36250 |
| Part of Walk | Princes, Rebels and the Pletzl: The Marais of Paris, from Hôtel de Ville to Bastille |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the courtyard at 23 rue de Sévigné and meet a king: a bronze Louis the Fourteenth in Roman armour and a cascading wig, by the sculptor Antoine Coysevox. Around him rises a Renaissance mansion, its walls carved with reliefs of the four seasons. This is the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris.
The statue is a rare survivor. It was made for the Hôtel de Ville in the 1680s, and it is said to be the only statue of Louis the Fourteenth in Paris that survived the Revolution. The house itself was begun in 1548 for a president of the Paris parliament, and its odd name comes from a later owner, the widow of a Breton nobleman called Kernevenoy, a name Parisian tongues could not manage and turned into Carnavalet.
From 1677 until her death in 1696, the house was rented by the most famous letter writer in French history, Madame de Sévigné. Her beloved daughter had married and moved to Provence, and for decades the mother wrote to her, often several times a week: court gossip, the latest sermon, a scandalous trial, the price of a ribbon, all with such wit that her letters became a classic of French literature. She affectionately called the house la Carnavalette.
The city bought the mansion in 1866 and opened the museum in 1880, and it has been swallowing memories of Paris ever since. There are old shop signs that once swung over the streets, painted views of the vanished medieval city, relics of the Revolution, including a model of the Bastille carved from one of its own stones, an entire jeweller's shop designed by Alphonse Mucha, and the bed in which Marcel Proust wrote much of In Search of Lost Time. After more than four years of renovation, the museum reopened in 2021.
Keep that little stone Bastille in mind; you will meet the real place at the end of this walk. Now walk west along rue des Francs-Bourgeois, turn left into rue Pavée, and you will arrive at the crossroads with the narrow, lively street that is the heart of Jewish Paris.