Local
history
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Photo: Ely Cathedral
by June Francis.
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Wikipedia articles:
Passy
Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy
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The boundary marker by P. Alejandro Díaz
(Wikimedia Commons) |
This is local history for me because, when I worked in Paris, I lived at Auteuil in the 16th arrondissement and regularly passed through Passy. The two localities were incorporated into Paris in the mid nineteenth century, but under the Ancien Régime they were separate seigniories and the boundary marker was placed in 1731. It can be found in a narrow street called rue Berton, which runs behind the house, now a museum, where the writer Honoré de Balzac lived.
We are used to the nineteenth-century Paris with its wide, straight streets and this narrow, curving street near the Parc de Passy seems out of place with its small-town atmosphere.
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Longer view of rue Berton by Mbzt
(Wikimedia Commons)
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There is quite a slope on the street and the house was built on a hillside. Balzac rented the top floor of the three-storey house, but at the front of the building his apartment had direct access to the garden and from that angle it appears to be a single-storey structure. The photo below shows this effect.
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Maison de Balzac by Rémi Jouan
(Wikimedia Commons)
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