Nicolas Flamel's House

The building at 51 rue de Montmorency is the oldest stone house in Paris. Nicolas Flamel had it built in 1407 as a hostel for the poor. The inscription on the ground-floor facade, still legible, asks residents to say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria for the dead. The upper floors provided lodging for itinerant workers who could not afford Paris rents, on the condition that they pray daily for the souls of the departed.

The Alchemist

Flamel was a public scribe who became fabulously wealthy in late fourteenth-century Paris. He endowed fourteen hospitals, seven churches, and three chapels. His contemporaries assumed alchemy. Flamel himself claimed to have achieved transmutation on January 13, 1382, turning mercury into silver, and again on April 25, 1382, turning mercury into gold. He was about eighty years old.

The skeptical reading: he was a moneylender who went to Spain to collect debts from exiled Jews at enormous commission rates, then lent money at profit to dissolute courtiers. The alchemical legend provided convenient cover.

For the full story: Nicolas Flamel: The Enigmatic Alchemist of Paris

The Building

The house survived the centuries because it was always occupied. It has been a shop, a school, and various businesses. For a hundred years after Flamel’s death in 1415, treasure hunters periodically tried to demolish it looking for hidden gold. As recently as 1816, someone bought the building specifically to search the walls and foundations.

Visiting

The building at 51 rue de Montmorency now houses the restaurant Auberge Nicolas Flamel. The ground-floor inscription is visible from the street. The restaurant serves French cuisine in medieval surroundings. Flamel’s tombstone is in the Musée de Cluny, a short walk away. The tower of the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, which Flamel helped fund, stands nearby in the Square de la Tour Saint-Jacques.