Musée de la Vie d'Autrefois (Museum of Life in Past Times)
Jamie and Hervé told us of a most unusual museum they had recently visited: La Musée de la Vie d’Autrefois, which can be translated as “The Museum of Life in Past Times.” It’s dedicated to showing what life in France was like from around 1800 to 1950. It does that by presenting 101 “scenes,” rooms that show how people lived and worked in those times. And it does that by creating a room showing everything - and I do mean everything that could have been in that room. It’s mind-boggling!
There are examples of rooms in a house: a living room, a dining room, bedrooms, the barn. There are examples of rooms representing every possible line of work you can imagine: a woodworker’s studio, a pharmacy, a hairdresser, a blacksmith, a basket-maker, a cobbler, a clog-maker, a bar, a dressmaker, a cooper (barrelmaker) and about 80 other professions. Every one of these scenes was jam-full of implements and tools of the trade - hundreds of them. It’s fascinating!
I’ll show pictures of a few of the scenes, but first, we had lunch in the restaurant attached to the museum. Jamie and Hervé had eaten lunch there on their first visit and said it was quite good and inexpensive. Yes, indeed.
For lunch. Laurie and Jamie had the menu: a three course lunch. First was a salad of chicken gizzards and lardon - a kinda bacon. I know that sounds unappetizing, but I’m here to tell you that it was delicious.
I forgot to take a picure of the dessert: tiramisu, which was also tasty. Cost of the three-course lunch: about $20.
Hervé and I opted for steak/frites, because steak/frites. Mighty good.
And the big surprise: we had to have a little rosé with lunch because that’s what we do. The restaurant offered a pichet of wine—half a liter, 2/3rds of a bottle—for about $6.50. Yes, $6.50 and it was fine. It was such a bargain that we had a second pichet. I wanted to know if we could buy some at that price to take some home with us.
A great start to our museum visit…
To prepare ourselves for the museum, we walked over to the Eiffel Tower. Well, a replica of the Eiffel Tower in the garden of the restaurant.
La Musée de la Vie d'Autrefois
No way to really describe this, so here are some pictures. Don’t worry, I didn’t take pictures of all 101 rooms.
I think you get the picture. Remember, there are 101 of these scenes, every one of them packed full with items salvaged from farms and homes in the region. We saw all of those scenes, but it’s hard to gather it all in. This museum definitely calls for a return visit in the future.