Victor Hugo was born in Besançon for the same reason that the poet Paul Verlaine was born in Metz. Their fathers were military officers who happened to be stationed in these out-of-the-way places in the eastern frontier provinces of France. Verlaine’s father was only a captain, whereas Hugo’s was (later) Read More …
Victor Hugo’s first visit to Liège was in 1840, when he was thirty-eight years old. He was travelling by stagecoach, known in French as a diligence, and was on his way from Paris to the Rhine Valley in Germany. In his book Le Rhin he described his approach to Liège Read More …
The Théâtre Royal de Liège, home of the Royal Opera of the Wallonia, was closed for several years to be reconstructed and enlarged. When I was there in 2011, I had the impression that the original building would be dwarfed by the new tower for stage machinery which was under Read More …
The Austerlitz Bridge is a stone bridge with five arches. It was originally built from 1801 to 1805, but it was widened and strengthened twice during the nineteenth century. The bridge was named after the Battle of Austerlitz, a French victory under the command of Emperor Napoléon I in 1805. Read More …
The sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) lived and worked in the Hôtel Biron in Paris for the last decade of his life. (The word Hôtel is used here in the old sense, meaning mansion.) In his will, he left the building and most of his sculptures to the French state, for Read More …
On August 11, 1858, the emperor Napoléon III arrived in Brest in his uncle’s boat, the Canot de l’empereur, rowed by twenty oarsmen, with a golden Neptune on the front (sorry, the prow), gold trim all along the edges and a huge golden crown on top. The audio guide at Read More …
The first French king to be crowned in the Reims Cathedral was Louis VIII in 1223. The twenty-fifth and last was Charles X in 1825. Charles’s predecessor Louis XVIII and his successor Louis Philippe both decided not to have elaborate coronation ceremonies so as not to stir up even more Read More …
The meeting point for this guided walking tour (in French) was the Métro station Notre-Dame des Champs. This is a small station with only one entrance, so there was no danger of waiting at the wrong one. When I arrived, people asked me if I was the guide, which of Read More …
If you go snooping around the western half of the 13th arrondissement (and adjoining sections of the 5th) in Paris you will find numerous references to a river called the Bièvre (pronunciation here) — but you won’t find the river itself, because it was banished underground over a century ago. Read More …
The Richelieu-Louvois Library is one of four Paris locations of the National Library of France, which in French is called the Bibliothèque nationale de France, abbreviated BnF. The other three Paris sites of the BnF are: The François Mitterrand Library (13th arrondissement) The Arsenal Library (4th arrondissement) The Library-Museum of the Read More …