Hôtel Biron

The Hôtel Biron is an hôtel particulier in the rue de Varenne, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, that was built from 1727 to 1732 to the designs of the architect Jean Aubert. Since 1919 it has housed the Musée Auguste Rodin.

The hôtel was built for a wig-maker, Abraham Peyrenc de Moras, who had speculated successfully in the ill-fated paper money schemes of John Law that had ruined many, at a time when the Faubourg Saint-Germain was still suburban in character. His house, the most superb in the neighborhood, was built as a free-standing structure, not entre cour et jardin ("between entrance court and garden") with party walls against adjoining buildings, as hôtels in more densely built quarters of Paris were traditionally built since the seventeenth century. The house is still surrounded by three hectares/7.3 acres of grounds. The house had boiseries carved in the full-blown rococo manner and has two elliptical salons that form attached pavilions at the corners of the garden front. There were sixteen medallions or overdoor paintings by François Lemoyne, premier peintre du roi, enframed in the paneling.

The Hôtel Peyrenc de Moras, as it then was, was completed in 1731, just a year before Peyrenc's death. His widow sold the house to the duchesse du Maine, who had married a natural son of Louis XIV; she took possession in January 1737 (Kimball loc. cit.) and made some minor changes. Upon the death of the duchess in 1753, the mansion became the property of the maréchal de Biron, hero of Fontenoy, whose name it has carried.

A plan of the house and gardens as they were in 1752 shows the deep terrace at the rear with a few wide bowed steps that led to matching parterres containing shaped compartments set in gravel and surrounded by shrubs tightly clipped in cones which flanked a wide central gravel walk. To the left of the deep cour d'honneur and entered from it, neatly clipped cabinets de verdure — small open-air rooms and recesses in fanciful shapes, connected by short galleries — were cut into solid greenery. To the right of the court was a subsidiary stable courtyard. Soon the gardens were swept away by the duc de Biron, in favour of a miniature park à l'Anglaise, achieved with trelliswork. When the "comte du Nord", the future Paul I of Russia, and his countess (who were traveling technically incognito for pleasure) visited Paris in 1782, they toured the garden, "one of the wonders of Paris, admiring the beauty of the flowers and the variety of the borders. They walked among the flower beds and the shrubberies, marvelling at the boldness and elegance of the trellis work forming gateways, arcades, grottoes, domes, Chinese pavilions..."

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