The comparison is edifying. On the one hand a poet crowned with glory, on the other, a novelist up to his eyes in debt, pursued by his creditors. Oddly built on two levels, this delightful house allowed Balzac, living under a false name, to escape them by the back door which opens on to a narrow street below. In his study, he would write all night, his back to the window. The transfigured memories of the novelist were to make the small town of Illiers the Combray of his childhood.
Visitors come from all over the world, some weep with emotion.
Her rejection of reverent reproduction, the use of pictures, sound, the architecture, light and colours provide a very purified and contemporary interpretation of Colette's world. George Sand's house, in Nohant. There was a time when Ferney was one of the most famous places in France. In Ferney, Voltaire, then aged sixty, could at last put into practice his ideas about work and society, planting trees, setting up factories, cutting taxes, writing for and acting in his theatre. The State has just bought the property and the Centre des Monuments Nationaux has embarked on some major restoration work.