On the second floor of number 6 place des Vosges, above the red-brick arcades, is the flat Victor Hugo rented from 1832 to 1848. These are the years in which he wrote Ruy Blas, in July 1838, was made a peer of France, in April 1845, and, on 17 November of that year, began Les Misères, the first version of Les Misérables. It is a museum now, and not a period house put back together: it is a biography told through the furniture, the objects and the works Hugo owned, or designed himself.
The permanent collection is usually free, but not at the moment: from 11 June to 22 November 2026 everything is paid for, collection included, because of the exhibition Hugo et l’architecture. The museum is closed on Mondays, and the Mulot café that many guides still recommend closed on 19 June.
Who designed the Chinese panels that cover one of the rooms?
Let’s begin!
How the house is arranged
The rooms follow Hugo’s life rather than the plan of the flat: before the exile, during the exile, after the exile. There are seven of them, they take an hour and they are on the second floor.
One thing that helps make sense of what you will see: in 1851, after Louis-Napoleon’s coup, Hugo left France and spent nineteen years away, most of them in the Channel Islands. The rooms in the middle of the museum come from there, not from here.
1. The antechamber, where Hugo is still a young man
The first room is about the family and the early success. Look at who signed the portraits: nearly all of them are by people in the household, the brothers Eugène and Achille Devéria, Louis Boulanger, his sister-in-law Julie Duvidal de Montferrier, a pupil of Baron Gérard, and madame Hugo herself.
Bear in mind something we now take for granted and that was rare then: Hugo was famous very early in three genres at once, poetry with Les Orientales, theatre with Hernani and the novel with Notre-Dame de Paris.
2. The red drawing room, where the guests came
Stop here longer than anywhere else. Hung with red damask, this is the room that evokes the flat as it was when literature, the arts and politics met around the leader of the Romantics. On the walls are the works that then hung in the great salon: the family portraits by Boulanger and by Auguste de Châtillon, and a canvas telling the story of Inez de Castro, a present from the duke and duchess of Orléans, which says how close Hugo was to the royal family.
The piece to look for is the marble bust by David d’Angers. Read the base: «À Victor Hugo, son ami P. J. David d’Angers, 1838». It is not a posthumous homage or an official portrait, it is a friend’s gift to a writer who at thirty-six was already a monument.
3. The salon chinois, which Hugo designed for Juliette Drouet
The panels were designed by Victor Hugo himself, between 1863 and 1864, and painted with the help of a craftsman, Tom Gore, who had already worked on the Hauteville House project.
They decorated the house of Juliette Drouet, Hugo’s companion, on Guernsey: the house was called Hauteville II and the panels were spread across four rooms. Paul Meurice bought them back from Juliette’s nephew to give them to the museum, and they were reassembled here as a «Chinese drawing room» with the help of the dealer in Asian art Siegfried Bing, whose gallery would later give Art Nouveau its name.
Go up close to the panels and look for the letters: among flowers, birds and little figures are the intertwined monograms VH and JD. The museum puts it plainly: this is a little-known side of Hugo’s genius, the decorator, and no other museum can show it.
4. The dining room, furniture taken apart and rebuilt
During the exile Hugo would go, often with Juliette or his sons, on what the museum calls the «hunt for old Guernsey chests», buying antique and Renaissance furniture. Then he had it taken apart and reassembled to his own taste, to his own drawings, by a team of joiners under Pierre Mauger.
What does a piece of furniture taken apart and remade by a poet look like?
The result is all around you: a door becomes a table, chests become sideboards or benches, cotton reels become candle rings, feet become columns. Look at the table: it is the one on which Hugo wrote the first series of the Légende des siècles, in 1859, and which he then gave to Juliette.
5. The small cabinet, which changes every time
The fifth room has no fixed display. The museum uses it for small themed hangs, with drawings, photographs, prints, manuscripts and printed matter: the works that cannot be shown permanently for conservation reasons.
It is the room that makes one visit different from another, and it is worth checking the website for what is on: this museum’s graphic collection is enormous and hardly anybody knows it.
6. The study, with the Rodin
The sixth room is about the return from exile, in 1870, and about fame. At its centre is the stand-up writing desk Hugo had made for himself late in life: anyone who pictures him hunched over a table is in for a surprise.
Who portrayed Hugo at the end of his life?
Around it are the portrait after Léon Bonnat, the Buste héroïque by Auguste Rodin, the grisailles prepared for the illustrated editions of his complete works, and the portrait of his grandchildren Georges and Jeanne, which points to L’Art d’être grand-père. There is also the image of Juliette Drouet painted by Bastien-Lepage a few months before her death: in a room about glory, it is the most private thing in it.
7. The bedroom he died in
The last room does not come from place des Vosges. From 1878 until his death Hugo lived at 130 avenue d’Eylau, renamed after him in 1881, and his grandchildren Georges and Jeanne made it possible for the museum to reconstruct his last bedroom faithfully.
Look at the bed: it is the one in which Victor Hugo died on 22 May 1885 and in which his body lay before the state funeral of 31 May and 1 June. Among the furniture are the Sèvres vases the government gave him for his seventy-ninth and eightieth birthdays, and several portraits made after his death. It is the quietest room in the house, and it is worth keeping for last.
Practical information
Data checked on 23 September 2026 on the official website maisonsvictorhugo.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. The permanent collection is normally free, but from 11 June to 22 November 2026 admission is charged for everything, exhibition and collection, because of Hugo et l’architecture. The museum’s page does not publish the price: you will find it on the ticket office, where booking is advisable anyway. Free admission. Under-18s go in free, as do students of fashion, fine arts, art history and archaeology, students of INALCO and INHA, disabled visitors and their companions, jobseekers and people on minimum social benefits. Reduced rate. The reduced rate applies from 18 to 26 inclusive, and to serving teachers, students and holders of the Pass famille and large-family cards. Opening hours. Every day except Monday, from 10:00 to 18:00. The ticket desk closes at 17:15 and the shop at 17:50. Cloakroom. The cloakroom is free and leaving your bag is compulsory: the maximum size is 40 × 30 × 20 centimetres, and neither coats nor valuables are accepted. Getting there. The entrance is at 6 place des Vosges. The stops are Bastille on lines 1, 5 and 8, Saint-Paul on line 1 and Chemin Vert on line 8. How long to allow. The seven rooms need an hour, and the square below deserves another half.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The square you can see from the windows has an article of its own, with its history and its arcades: place des Vosges. The other Marais museums are all on foot: the Musée Carnavalet, which keeps the interiors Le Brun painted for another house on this same square, the Musée Cognacq-Jay, the Musée Picasso, the mahJ and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. And if the Rodin bust caught your eye, his sculptures are at the Musée Rodin.
Photo credits: front on place des Vosges by Staroad.fr (CC BY-SA 4.0); salon chinois, David d’Angers bust and bedroom by Vassil (CC0), from Wikimedia Commons.
