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.

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First course: salad. You have to appreciate the presentation—almost all plates served in France are lovely to look at, like this one.
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Second course, chicken in sauce. Excellent again. (Laurie stole those frites from me.)

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.

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Perfect!

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.

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Jamie and Hervé under the replica of the Eiffel Tower (about 1/20th scale, we think) in the garden of chez Grand Mere - the restaurant at the museum

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.

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A true "family room" of the early 1800s. See those things with white and red curtains? Beds. Really, the whole life of a family unfolded in this room.
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An early-1900s bedroom.
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The agricultural section had every farm implement known to man (the 1800s/early-1900s man).
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A traveling still! The owner would haul it from town to town and folks would use it to brew up some fruit wine using part of their fruit crop. The still owner could take payment in money or a few bottles of the product, which he could sell.
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A travelling wine press! Same deal as the traveling still.
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An 1800s house's dining room. The scenario is a traveling salesman presenting his "labor-saving" wares and other products to the woman of the house.
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A small part of a shop dealing with garden implements. This is maybe a quarter of what was in this one scene. Every scene was equally well stocked with stuff.
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The scene of a laundry.
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In the bar scene, a foosball table! Some things never change.

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.


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