I already
mentioned this remarkable building in some previous posts, see here and here. Already
from the outside it’s really amazing and it certainly has some of nicest
gutters you’ve ever seen (see top picture).
It’s a very
large mansion (hôtel particulier) built around 1880 for a banker, Emile
Gaillard (1821-1902), and it’s still referred to as Hôtel Gaillard. It may be
interesting to know that he was the banker of many of France’s richest
dynasties, of Victor Hugo… and that he once was one of Chopin’s best pupils –
Chopin even, in 1840, when Emile was 19, dedicated one of his mazurkas to him
(Mazurka in A minor, B. 140 – you can listen to it on the net) !
Emile was
married, there were children… , but the vast space was obviously especially
requested to make place for a fantastic art collection, mostly from previous
centuries. He asked the architect, Jules Février (1842-1937) to take
inspiration from the Loire Valley renaissance castles (Blois, Gien…).
After Emile’s death, the art collection was sold, but it took until after WWI before the building was acquired by the Bank of France, who after much work, opened a branch office here, closed in 2006.
A lot of the original architecture is fortunately still there, however we must of course remember that it had become a bank during some 85 years before closing with e.g. an important bank vault surrounded by heavy walls (temporarily closed when I visited – I “stole” a photo from the net).
On one of the walls you can find some caricatures in relief, one of Gaillard, holding a purse and one of the architect, Février, holding a compass.
It took then some time for the
Bank to decide what to do with this building. There were some ideas to make it into some kind of a “Dumas Centre”, the three Dumas (grand-father, father, son)
are all represented on the Square in front of the hotel (as, you can see on one of the photos, is Sarah Bernhardt
who lived around the corner for a couple of years. I talked about all this in
the posts I referred to above.)
Finally, the decision was taken to make the
place to a “Cité de l’Economie”, dedicated to economics, moneys… and, after a
few years of restoration, it opened to public mid-June this year. If you want
to learn something about economics there is now plenty of information - screens
all over, of all sizes… documentation… Despite my education in economics, I was
personally much more interested in the building itself.
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