The oldest house in Paris
Labels :
DaVinci Code,
Harry Potter,
Nicolas Flamel,
Oldest house in Paris,
Paris 10,
Paris architecture
This is the oldest still existing building in Paris, from 1407. More ore less impossible to take a “decent” photo, the street is narrow. The address is 51, rue de Montmorency, 3rd arrdt. There is a restaurant on the ground floor.It was built for Nicolas Flamel (1330? – 1417), an interesting personality. He was a very successful scrivener, manuscript maker and seller. (This was before Gutenberg.)
He incidentally got hold of a book which he then thought to be the Codex, the “Book of Abraham”, and he spent some 20 years to together with his wife to decode the contents, according to what was thought, sufficiently well to recreate the recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone, producing gold and the elixir for eternal life. Anyhow, he became very rich… and when his grave was later opened it was empty…
He was certainly a great alchemist and his works in this area were taken seriously, studied by scientists during centuries, including by Isaac Newton, whose main “hobby” seems to have been alchemy. Flamel is also mentioned as one of the Grand Masters of the obviously imaginary “Priory of Sion” and as such is of course referred to in the Da Vinci Code. He was also pretended to be a friend of Albus Dumbledore and to be the inventor of the Philosophers’ (or Sorcerer’s) Stone in the first Harry Potter book. He has been forgotten neither by Victor Hugo, nor by Umberto Eco.It is believed that if he got rich, it’s rather thanks to labour and good, possibly more or less morally correct, investments. He was a generous person – spent most of his money on building hospices, repairing churches and helping the poor. The house we can see was opened to needing persons.
The inscription (“Nous homes et femes laboureurs…”) which still can be seen on the front of the house says more or less in a free and abbreviated translation: “The men and women who live in this house will have the right to a daily Paternoster and Ave Maria….”
I have not found a clear explanation for the choice of the place of the Observatoire. It’s interesting to see that it’s exactly in the axe of the then already exisiting Palais de Luxembourg, built on the initiative of Marie de Medici (Henry IV’s widow), who was much interested in astrology. You find the same north-south axe around the Invalides, built at the same period as the Observatoire.
The “Da Vinci Code” refers to this axe, the “Rose Line”. Actually the French meridian passes well the Louvre, but not exactly where the pyramid is, whereas the St. Sulpice church is well out of the axe.
To find the trace of the axe, the “Da Vinci Code” refers to the 135 “Arago plates”, 12 cm (= 4,7 inches, - the meter is not yet adapted all over) bronze disks which were placed along the axe in 1994. You still find most of them along the streets – but some have disappeared; nice pieces of collection.(Arago was a 19th century French astronomer and politician.) 
The axe is in Paris also visualised in the park just behind the Observatoire and by the so called “mires”, one at Montmartre (north) and one in the Montsouris Park (south). You can read that they were erected in 1806 during the reign of….- the name of Napoleon has disappeared.
The meter was “invented” by the French Academy of Sciences in 1793, based on researches made at the Observatory, as being one ten-millionth of the length of the meridian. (Nowadays it’s equal to the distance traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second or something similar!)
