15 May 2017 / leggypeggy

Museum shows Paris of bygone days

art, clocks, cradle, jewellery, museums, paintings, Paris, staircase, townhouse, travel

A grand staircase in the Musée Carnavalet

Museum exterior

Museum staircase

Paris is overrun with museums, but few give you a true idea of what the city was like, say, at the time of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Luckily, the Musée Carnavalet fills in the gaps beautifully.

Housed in two townhouses in the Marais district, the Carnavalet is the city’s oldest municipal museum

We had the luxury of spending an afternoon there, exploring the more than 100 rooms that hold more than 600,000 items.

There are paintings galore showing scenes of Paris in bygone days, as well as countless re-creations of rooms in styles ranging from the 17th to the 20th century. Clocks were an important feature in every room, and I seem to have taken way too many pictures of them. Sorry!

Room occupied by Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette

One of my favourite displays was the re-creation of the Temple Tower rooms where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were imprisoned for about six months in 1793. Later royalists viewed the Temple Tower as a sign of the suffering faced by their royal family after the French Revolution. To keep the tower from becoming a destination for pilgrims, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the tower destroyed in 1808.

The fact that the furnishings from those rooms still exist at all is thanks to donations and the estates of Jacques-Albert Berthélemy, an architect who lived in the tower, and Jean Baptise Cléry, the king’s last valet.

Art Nouveau jewellery shop, Carnavalet Museum

Fouquet’s extraordinary jewellery shop, designed by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha

Base of sales counter

Jewellery shop

My other absolute favourite was the gorgeous art nouveau shop owned by jeweller, George Fouquet.

The entire room is from the original jewellery store designed by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha in 1901. Fouquet donated his shop in its entirety to the Carnavalet, and it was reassembled as it was. It’s a small room brimming with colour and grandiose, a completely preserved Belle Epoque work of art. I could live in this space.

Some other special exhibits are a prince’s cradle and the cork-lined bedroom of French writer Marcel Proust.

Marcel Proust’s cork-lined bedroom

A prince’s cradle

A bit more about the museum and its two townhouses
The idea of a museum devoted to the history of Paris came about during the Second Empire (1852–70), when a large part of the historic heart of Paris was being demolished.

In 1866, at the instigation of Baron Haussmann, the city council bought the hôtel Carnavalet, which had been built in 1548, to house the new institution.

The museum opened in 1880. It has been extended several times and since 1989 it has also occupied the adjoining townhouse, hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, built in 1688.

P.S. I mentioned earlier that, in French, the word ‘hôtel’ often refers to a mansion and not an actual hotel.

Musée Carnavalet clock