The Chartrons: Wine Merchants and Antique Dealers

Cours Xavier Arnozan and its merchant mansions

A tree-lined promenade built by the wine trade, lined with 18th century merchant houses.

This wide, tree-lined cours was laid out for the men who sold the wine. It began as a muddy track called the Fausse Braye and became a promenade known as the Pavé des Chartrons in 1746. In 1764 the architect Étienne Laclotte drew up long, narrow plots for wealthy merchants. Each one put his house on the cours and his chais, his wine storehouses, at the back, reached through a service lane that still opens onto rue Notre-Dame. Look at the stone façades between rue Notre-Dame and cours de Verdun: they were built to match, and the names behind them, Gernon, Lawton, Guestier, Cruse, stayed on the local cadastral maps for more than a century. At number 51 lived François Seignouret, who made his fortune as a furniture maker in New Orleans and came home with the design for the armoire à glace, the mirrored wardrobe.

Rue Notre-Dame and its antique dealers

Seven hundred metres of antique shops, brocante, and galleries in the old village heart.

You've stepped onto the street that gave the Chartrons its village feel. Rue Notre-Dame runs for about seven hundred metres, and more than forty antique and brocante dealers still line it, along with galleries, bakers, and wine shops. The anchor is the Village Notre-Dame, a covered warren of dealers that opened in 1982 inside an old printing works. It packed about thirty stands onto two floors, the first permanent antiques gallery in the region.

As you walk, notice the low vaulted cellars and wide doorways at street level. They were cut for rolling barrels, not for boutiques. At number 29, a Moorish-looking façade covered in ceramic tiles is left over from the Grands Bains des Chartrons, a bathhouse with seventy tubs that closed in 1923. The tiles came from a local faience works founded by David Johnston.