Nineteenth-century town
France > Brittany > Southern > Nantes > Nineteenth-century town
The financier Graslin took charge of the development of the western part of the city in the 1780s, when Nantes' prosperity was at a high due to the sugar and slave trades. Place Royale, with its distinctive fountain, was first laid out in the closing years of the eighteenth century, and has been rebuilt since it was bombed in 1943; the 1780s also produced the nearby place Graslin, named after its creator, with the elaborately styled Grand Théâtre, whose Corinthian portico contrasts with the 1895 Art Nouveau of La Cigale brasserie on the corner.West of the place Royale on rue Crebillon, a spectacular nineteenth-century multi-level shopping centre, the Passage Pommeraye, drops down three flights of stairs towards the river. The attention to detail lavished upon it is on a scale undreamt of in modern malls, giving a glimpse of early consumerism; each of the gas lamps that light the central area is held by an individually crafted marble cherub. Rue Voltaire runs west of the place Graslin, leading to the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle at no. 12 (Tues–Sat 10am–noon & 2–5pm, Sun 2–5pm; €3.10). This holds an eccentric assortment of oddities, including tatty stuffed specimens of virtually every bird and animal imaginable, plus rhinoceros toenails, a coelecanth, an aepyornis egg, and an Egyptian mummy. There's even a complete tanned human skin, taken in 1793 from the body of a soldier whose dying wish was to be made into a drum, while a small vivarium shelters living snakes and reptiles. Further along is Viollet-le-Duc's Palais Dobrée (Tues–Fri 9.45am–5.30pm, Sat & Sun 2.30–5.30pm; €3), a nineteenth-century mansion given over to two museums, one of which claims to feature Duchess Anne's heart in a box.
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