This is the Place des Vosges — thirty-six red brick houses, four stories each, arranged in a perfect square around the park. Every facade is identical, because the king ordered it that way. Henri the Fourth built this in sixteen twelve, which makes it the oldest planned square in Paris. It's also one of the quietest cons in Paris real estate.
Look closely at the brick. Some of it isn't brick. A number of these facades are plaster — scored, tinted, and painted to LOOK like brick. Real brick was expensive, and the builders gambled that nobody would check. Nobody checked. The most elegant square in Paris has been wearing brick-print wallpaper for four hundred years, and it works, because no one inspects anything this pretty.
The square started life as Place Royale. Then the Revolution arrived, and royal anything became a liability. In eighteen hundred the government renamed it for the Vosges, the first department in France to pay its new taxes. That's the entire story. The most beautifu
l square in Paris is a receipt. For years afterward, the runner-up department, the Doubs, disputed the result — they insisted their payment had left first and blamed the roads. France has never re-run the contest.
Now find the corner apartment at number six. In eighteen thirty-two, Victor Hugo moved into the second floor, age thirty, already famous, and stayed sixteen years. He draped the drawing
