MORNING SELECTION
Travel restrictions have been lifted. We take the opportunity to visit houses that have inspired great authors: Maurice Leblanc in Normandy, Chateaubriand and Alexandre Dumas at the gates of Paris, Edmond Rostand in the Basque Country and Pierre Loti in Charente-Maritime.
The tribute to Lupine by Maurice Leblanc, in Etretat
“He’s my best Lupine”, said Maurice Leblanc of this building where he wrote most of the adventures of the “gentleman burglar”. Beautiful half-timbered house of Anglo-Norman type, located in the center of Etretat, the Clos Lupine nestles its two floors in the heart of a pretty garden. Inside, a fun museum around the character, who himself guides the visitor through twelve rooms filled with his “memories”: capes and top hats, objects from the Roaring Twenties, movie posters… Reality has even joins the fiction: certain visitors keen on esotericism, convinced that Maurice Leblanc has hidden traces there allowing to find the famous treasure of the Abbé Saunière, come to look for them at Clos Lupine.
Le Clos Lupine, 15, rue Guy-de-Maupassant 76790 Etretat, 02-35-10-59-53.
La-Vallée-aux-Loups of Chateaubriand, in Châtenay-Malabry
Exiled outside Paris in 1807 for journalistic impertinence, Chateaubriand bought a barn in Châtenay-Malabry which he quickly transformed into a “troubadour gothic” style mansion, in particular decorating it with a spectacular double flight staircase. . In the Vallée-aux-Loups park, he planted many North American and Middle Eastern trees. “This narrow space seemed to me suitable for enclosing my long hopes”, he wrote. Today, his successive heirs have added buildings, but the facade has remained the same, and the place houses a documentation center of several thousand volumes. Ravaged by the 1999 storm, the park is in the process of being replanted.
The domain of Chateaubriand, Vallée-aux-Loups park, 87, rue Chateaubriand 92290 Châtenay-Malabry, 01-55-52-13-00.
Edmond Rostand’s kitsch Arnaga, in Cambo-les-Bains
He had a nose… While going to treat pneumonia in Cambo-les-Bains, in the Basque Country, Edmond Rostand fell in love with the place and decided to stay there. After two rentals, he bought a plot of fifteen hectares and built a house for which he diverted water from the Arnaga stream, from which he also borrowed the name. He made a folly of it, employing about thirty servants, populating it with a crowd of animals that he had wanted all white: white peacocks, white horses, white dogs… The interior was designed as a stage set. This is where he wrote Chantecler, at the same time as he supervised the construction (three years of work). Even today, it’s both sumptuous and kitsch.
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