Back to Balzac

by P.B. LeCron
Most sightseers who venture into Paris' chic, residential Passy neighborhood go there to admire the quarter's lavish Art Nouveau buildings that have risen up in between the typical bourgeois Haussmannian constructions of the latter half of the 19th century. If they make their way to Rue Raynouard, however, they will come upon an unexpected and picturesque anomaly: a modest, late 18th-century country house and garden--one of the last traces of the old village of Passy. They may be puzzled that such an unpretentious house has survived more than a century of real estate speculation...