Hôtel de Lauzun

The Hôtel de Lauzun carries an elaborate stone facade carved with masks and garlands, standing quietly on the edge of the Seine. In sixteen fifty-six, Charles Gruyn des Bordes, a wealthy army contractor, began this house to flaunt his social climbing. He barely lived to see it finished before landing in prison for fraud. The interior holds a collection of seventeenth-century paintings and gilded woodwork, but the house is known for the man who arrived later, the flamboyant Duke of Lauzun, who gambled away his fortune inside.