Hôtel de Beauvais

The Hôtel de Beauvais is a grand seventeenth-century residence at sixty-eight Rue François Miron. You can identify the building by its imposing, curved stone balcony that hangs directly over the street entrance. Built between sixteen fifty-four and sixteen sixty for Catherine Bellier, the first lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne of Austria, this mansion sits on an irregular plot of land that once held a medieval monastery. Its architect, Antoine Le Pautre, designed the residence to project an illusion of perfect symmetry despite the jagged shape of the site.