La Muette
France > Paris > West > Passy > From La Muette to the Maison de Balzac
From La Muette métro, head east along the old high street, rue de Passy, past an eye-catching parade of boutiques, until you reach place de Passy and the crowded but leisurely terrace of Le Paris Passy café. From the place, stroll southeast along cobbled, pedestrianized rue de l'Annonciation, a pleasant blend of down-to-earth and genteel well-heeled which gives more of the flavour of old Passy. You may no longer be able to have your Bechstein repaired here or your furniture lacquered, but the food shops that now dominate the street have delectable displays guaranteed to make your mouth water.When you hit rue Raynouard, cross the road and veer to your right, where at no. 47 you'll discover the Maison de Balzac (Tues–Sun 10am–5.40pm; €3.35; M° Av-du-Prés-Kennedy–Maison-de-Radio-France & M° Passy), a delightful, summery little house with pale-green shutters and a decorative iron entrance porch, tucked away down some steps among a tree-filled garden. Balzac moved to this secluded spot in 1840 in the hope of evading his creditors. He lived under a pseudonym, and visitors had to give a special password before being admitted. Should any unwelcome callers manage to get past the door, Balzac would escape via a backdoor and down to the river via a network of underground cellars. It was here that he wrote some of his best-known works, including La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons. The museum preserves his study, simple writing desk and monogrammed cafetière – frequent doses of caffeine must have been essential during his long writing stints, which could extend up to 16 to 18 hours a day for weeks on end. One room is devoted to the development of ideas for the creation of a monument to Balzac, resulting in the famously blobby Rodin sculpture of the writer: caricatures of the sculpture by cartoonists of the time are on display here. Other exhibits include letters to Mme Hanska, whom he eventually married after an eighteen-year courtship, and a highly complex family tree of around a thousand of the four thousand-plus characters that feature in his Comédie Humaine. Outside, the shady, rose-filled garden is a delightful place to dally on wrought-iron seats, surrounded by busts of the writer. Behind Balzac's house, and reached via some steps descending from rue Raynouard, rue Berton is a cobbled path with gas lights still in place, blocked off by the heavy security of the Turkish embassy. The building, an eighteenth-century Château shrouded by greenery and screened by a high wall and guards, was once a clinic where the pioneering Dr Blanche tried to treat the mad Maupassant and Gérard de Nerval, among others; before that it was the home of Marie-Antoinette's friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, who met a grisly fate at the hands of revolutionaries in 1792. You can get a better view of the building from cobbled rue d'Ankara, reached by heading down avenue de Lamballe and then right into avenue du Général-Mangin.
| 