We’re not nearly done with our commemorative series of visits to mark the temporary closure of the Carnavalet Museum. Today we go to the Café Militaire.
As I’ve remarked before, one of the wonderful things about this museum is that it preserves interiors from vanished buildings, such as the staircase of the vanished Hôtel de Luynes, which we inspected in a recent post. Another one of these preserved interiors is that of the Café Militaire.
The decoration of this establishment was commissioned from the young architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux by the distiller Godeau. The venue was a house built in 1761-62 by another architect on the site of what is now the Louvre des Antiquaires. The house, which no longer exists, was in the ‘Greek’ style, so Godeau wanted a suitably ‘Greek’ decorative scheme.
According to the onsite info placard — from which I got all of this information, by the way — the architect opted for a martial scheme of 12 columns in the form of fascicles (vertical bundles) of lances topped by capitals in the guise of warriors’ helmets.
The paneling of the vanished Café Militaire preserved in the Carnavalet Museum. Note the columns with the helmet capitals.
