Boulevard Malesherbes cuts a wide, straight path through the neighborhood, marked by the uniform, creamy limestone facades of Baron Haussmann’s renovations. Before the eighteen sixties, this area was a tangle of uneven streets and old gardens. Napoleon the Third ordered the boulevard built to connect the Madeleine church to the outskirts of the city. Marcel Proust lived at number one hundred two for many years, where he wrote much of his masterpiece while surrounded by the heavy, muffled silence of cork-lined walls.
Boulevard Malesherbes
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