The French Playing Card Museum

The Musée Français de la Carte à Jouer occupies a nineteenth-century manor house that stands out for its weathered stone facade and the distinct lack of typical museum grandeur. It houses a collection started by Louis Chardonnet, a former mayor who obsessively gathered over six thousand card games throughout his life. These rooms hold decks once used by royal households and fragile sheets of cards still stuck to the original printing blocks. Collectors often spend hours staring at a single seventeenth-century design.