It doesn’t matter how many times they expand the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’s past is so colossally rich that it could never be squeezed into its great public buildings. The city has instead developed its own breed of ‘house museum’ — ready-made monuments to its distinguished inhabitants.
It’s not just regular tourist stops like the Maison de Victor Hugo, either. In Montparnasse, the studios of artists Ossip Zadkine and Antoine Bourdelle display sublime sculpted figures in shaded gardens, and across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower you will find Balzac’s former village home, cramped among the Belle Époque curves and 1970s luxury towers of the 16ème. Up by the folly-flecked Parc Monceau is the Musée Nissim de Camondo, a house inhabited by a collection that eventually consumed its collector, and down in Saint-Germain the Musée Delacroix can be found, cloistered within a series of courtyards and staircases.
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