For seven years the tenant of this house went by a name that was not his own, and the lease was in somebody else’s name. From 1840 to 1847 Honoré de Balzac lived at 47 rue Raynouard as Monsieur de Breugnol, a surname borrowed from his housekeeper, and he did it for a very practical reason: his creditors were looking for him, and in Passy, then a village outside Paris, nobody came round to check who was paying the rent.
Of Balzac’s eleven Paris homes this is the only one still standing, and it is now a City of Paris museum like the Maison de Victor Hugo, which means the permanent collection is free. There is building work going on, though: the work on the facades, on the rue Berton side, runs until November 2026, and the museum apologises in advance for the noise during the visit.
How do you put a body of ninety titles into order?
Let’s go!
1. The false name on the lease
Balzac arrived in Passy in October 1840, and he arrived hunted. He had debts going back to the collapse of his printing works, in 1828, and he had made them worse with the expenses of a life he could not afford. What he rented was an outbuilding of number 47: a dining room, a drawing room and a bedroom with the study attached, plus the use of the cellar and the garden. It cost 650 francs a year, and to make it habitable Balzac had to spend a thousand more. The lease carries the name of Louise Breugnol, his housekeeper, and anyone who knocked at the door was told that Monsieur de Balzac did not live there.
This is not the house of an established writer who has bought himself a retreat, and the rooms say so. It is a hiding place, chosen because it was cheap and because it had two ways out. Balzac was forty-one, and he stayed until 1847, three years before he died.
The house you walk through is the lower part of a larger building, set against the slope of the Passy hill. You go in from the top, from rue Raynouard, and you walk down. So from the street what you see is the roof.
2. The table of the Comédie humaine
The cabinet de travail is the room the journey is for, and it is small. Red walls, a carved fireplace, a padded armchair and, in the middle, the table Balzac worked at, now protected by a glass case with two manuscript sheets inside it.
What did this table really produce?
Not only new pages. The title Comédie humaine appears for the first time in 1840, the year of the move to Passy, and here Balzac took dozens of novels already published separately and turned them into a single system, with the same characters passing from one book to the next. The first sixteen volumes of the Furne edition were completed in 1846, while he was living in these rooms: the work of reordering counts as much as the work of writing, and this house is where it happened.
Balzac worked at night. He got up at around one in the morning, wrote until well into the day, slept a few hours and began again. Look at the armchair: it is the only comfortable piece of furniture in the room.
3. The coffee pot, and the coronet he had no right to
On the table stands the most famous object in the house, and it is a Limoges porcelain coffee pot. His friend Zulma Carraud gave it to him in 1832, and Balzac took it with him for the rest of his life.
The monogram painted on the coffee pot carries the letters HB, and above the letters sits a count’s coronet. That coronet is the most Balzacian thing in the house. The writer was born Honoré Balzac, the son of a civil servant, and he added the noble particle himself around 1830, claiming descent from the Balzac d’Entragues, a family he had no proven connection with. On the coffee pot he used every night, the invented genealogy is fired into the glaze.
The photograph above was taken by the Rol agency in 1909, a year before the house opened as a museum, and beside the coffee pot you can see the bronze inkwell.
On the coffee itself, be careful with what you will read elsewhere. The figures that circulate, fifty cups a day, thirty, change according to who is telling the story, and no contemporary source confirms them. What Balzac actually wrote is in the Traité des excitants modernes, published in 1839: there he describes coffee ground very fine and taken on an empty stomach, and he presents it as a working technique rather than a vice.
4. The door on rue Berton
Why would a writer on the run from his creditors rent a house with two exits?
The house has two entrances, one on rue Raynouard and one, lower down, on rue Berton, which is still a paved lane with an old wall and a lantern. This is not a later reconstruction: the lease of 1840 describes the flat as standing at «rue Basse no. 19 and rue du Roc no. 5», the two names those streets carried at the time, with an entrance on each. That double exit is the practical reason Balzac chose Passy, and it is also the source of every anecdote you will already have heard, with the writer slipping out of the lower door while the creditor knocks at the upper one.
The double exit is documented. The escape scenes, on the other hand, come from the Balzac legend built up after his death, and it is worth taking them for what they are. When you are inside the museum, step out for a moment on the lower side: rue Berton is one of the very few streets in Paris that has kept the look of a village, and it is worth the detour on its own.
5. The garden, with the benches and the apple tree
From the courtyard you go in through a green glazed porch, with a canopy of pierced ironwork, and along both sides of it runs a row of benches set against the wall, a blue green darker than the canopy. An apple tree grows in the garden, and at the end of summer the fruit hangs over the benches.
Do not expect Balzac’s garden, though: nothing is known about what it looked like in his day, and what you walk through was made from scratch over 650 square metres, in three bands, with a screen of greenery along the rue Raynouard wall, a lawn with trees and, towards rue Berton, thickets, vines and espaliered fruit trees.
Passy was absorbed into Paris in 1860 and the district was rebuilt almost entirely between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This low building, halfway up the slope and hidden behind others, survived, and it is now the last trace of the coteaux of Passy as they looked before the city arrived. In the cellars, the excavations of 2002 found rock-cut dwellings of the late Middle Ages: the only ones known in Paris.
6. The Eiffel Tower from the window
Look at the first photograph again. High on the left, above a white flat roofed building, rises the Eiffel Tower, and you see about half of it: a detail that says two things at once.
The first is practical: you are in the sixteenth arrondissement, a few minutes from the Trocadéro, and this visit fits well into a day on the Right Bank. The second is chronological. Balzac died in 1850, thirty-nine years before the tower was inaugurated. The house where he wrote at night now looks out at a monument he never saw, one that has become the symbol of the city he described street by street.
Read also: The Eiffel Tower in Paris: 7 things to know to visit the symbol of Paris (updated 2026)
7. From hiding place to museum
The house was saved by a man of letters, Louis Baudier de Royaumont, who had come across it in 1890 on a visit and who on 16 May 1908 took the flat on lease. He opened the museum on 16 July 1910. The house then passed to the State in 1929 and to the City of Paris in 1949, and opened as a municipal museum in 1960.
Today it keeps thousands of Balzac documents, portraits, first editions and the famous corrected proofs, the ones Balzac covered with additions until printing became a nightmare for his typesetters. Do not expect sumptuous rooms: the strength of the place is that the rooms have stayed as small as they were.
One warning about expectations: the most famous portrait of Balzac, the one in a white monk’s robe with his arms folded painted by Louis Boulanger, is not here. It hangs in the musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours, on loan from the Louvre, and the Tours picture is in any case the sketch, because the finished canvas commissioned in 1836 by Ewelina Hańska is considered lost.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 September 2026 on the official site maisondebalzac.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The permanent collection is free for everyone, as in the other City of Paris museums. The temporary exhibitions are charged for, and the price changes from one exhibition to the next. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-18:00, and the last admission is at 17:30. Closing days. It closes on Mondays, on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. On open days too the shop closes before the museum, at 17:50. Note: the work on the facades, on the rue Berton side, goes on until November 2026, and the museum apologises in advance for the noise. Accessibility. The garden and the permanent collections are accessible to visitors with reduced mobility. Getting there. The address is 47 rue Raynouard, in the sixteenth, but you go in at number 49. Get off at Passy on line 6, or at La Muette on line 9. On the RER C get off at Boulainvilliers or at Radio France. Buses 22, 32, 52, 70 and 72 stop here as well. Bags. At the entrance you are asked to open your bags and show what is inside, and there are lockers. The café and the library. The tea room is run by Rose Bakery and follows the museum’s hours. The library is open Tuesday to Friday, but you have to contact it first. How long it takes. Allow an hour for the rooms and the garden, and half an hour more if there is a temporary exhibition.
Where to go from here
The house museum of the other great French novelist of the nineteenth century is on the far side of the city: the Maison de Victor Hugo on place des Vosges, also free and also left as it was. On the same bank of the river, a quarter of an hour on foot, is the Musée Marmottan Monet, which has the largest collection of Monet in the world.
In the house museums of Paris you almost always see the furniture and almost never the craft. The two exceptions are the Musée Gustave Moreau, where the studio takes up two floors, and the Musée Delacroix.
Photo credits: front and entrance from the garden by Мандрівниця (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons; cabinet de travail by Romainbehar (CC0); coffee pot and inkwell, Agence Rol 1909, BnF, public domain.
