Sue Chenette: Les Journées du Patrimoine

Last Saturday and Sunday tout le monde queued up for a glimpse into rooms with tall windows and gilt mirrors, coffered ceilings and intricately panelled doors; rooms lined with paintings and statues, lighted with chandeliers.

It was the weekend of Les Journées du Patrimoine, or Heritage Days, when doors normally closed are opened to the public.

Behind them, beauty, and history. The Hôtel de Lauzun, a luxurious private mansion built on Île St Louis in the 17th century, languished after the revolution. It had become a neglected rental property by the mid-nineteenth century, when it was purchased by an art collector who began restorations.

The rooms in the Hôtel de Ville (city hall) were burnt rubble in 1871, during the violent days of the Commune and the Franco-Prussian war. The lavish décor dates from the1880s, when the building was reconstructed.

Beauty and history. But in the rooms we walked through, the history had subsided. It was as if somewhere along the way, after the revolution and the restoration and the empires and the barricades and the commune, the French had said to each other, “Let’s keep the beauty.”

On the weekend, that was what they waited in those hours-long lines to see.

A footnote to the Hôtel de Lauzun:  one of the 19th century renters  was Charles Baudelaire, who wrote the first poems  of Les Fleurs du mal in an attic apartment.

Actors from one of the many small theatres in Paris entertained us with scenes from his writings as we waited in the queue.