Museums: Filigrees & Forgings

The summer's rush of tourists began to flood into Paris last week, attracted always by its reputation for high style, fine restaurants and magnificent art collections. But as any seasoned traveler knows, there is more to France than just Paris. And already Francophiles were circling on their maps those little-known, remote museums that, as the Guide Michelin says of its top restaurants, are "well worth the trip."

Traditionalists were planning stopovers at the Musée Ingres in the Gascon town of Montauban, or the Musée Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi.

Modernists will make a beeline for the Maeght Foundation in sunny St.-Paul-de-Vence, with its celebrated abundance of Picassos, Chagalls and Mirós, then move on to the Musée Fernand Léger in Biot and the Picasso museum in the Château Grimaldi in Antibes. And for some 30,000 lovers of ironwork—from forthright masculine forging to lacy feminine filigree, from the Roman keys to the needlepoint balustrade that graced Mme. de Pompadour's country mansion—there is Rouen's Musée Le Secq des Tournelles.

700 Padlocks. This remarkable museum (see color opposite) houses 12,000 examples of the smithy's cunning, assembled by a minor Parisian nobleman named Henri Le Secq des Tournelles and his father Jerome Le Secq des Tournelles, between 1870 and 1921. Henri gave his collection to the city of Rouen a year before his death when the city fathers offered to house it in the 15th century Church of St. Laurent, which had been secularized and abandoned during the Revolution. To the younger Des Tournelles, iron collecting was a kind of madness. His wife divorced him over it, his fortune was squandered on it, and the story goes that after he had given his collection to Rouen, he moved into a church tower. On certain days, he could be seen sitting on a curbstone, dining from a tin of sardines—with a servant standing in readiness behind him with a white linen napkin.

How Des Tournelles came by some of his treasures is a question that the museum's curator, Mlle. Olga Popovitch, prefers not to investigate too closely. She does note that the feather-light iron choir grille displayed in one tiny chapel comes from the d'Ourscamp Abbey, on the banks of the Oise, which is still part of an operating monastery. The museum also contains iron jewelry (fashionable in Napoleon's day, when the British blockade prevented the import of finer metals), orthopedic corsets, bird cages, croupiers' roulette rakes, ornate medieval shop signs, kitchen utensils, 3,000 keys, 700 padlocks, 600 door knockers, and more than 100 pairs of scissors, including one shaped like a pelican with the blades forming its beak. Coffee mills designed to grind the precious beans in the 17th century, when Madame de Sévigné purportedly scoffed that "Racine will pass—like coffee," bear little resemblance to the streamlined models sold in France today, but their shape is basically the same. A craftsman's implement bears the doughty motto: "I am Jacques' chisel. Let me lie. I'll work for him until I die."