Sections of 18th-century gilded walls and paintings of deities are sprawled across the floor of a warehouse on this city’s outskirts. After nine decades in limbo, this architectural salvage is being reorganized into period rooms that will rival Versailles’s for inventiveness and visual impact.
The pieces came from the interior of a townhouse built near the Louvre around 1707 for Philippe II, the duke of Orléans, a nephew of Louis XIV. In the 1920s, before demolishing the building so that its own quarters could expand, the Bank of France labeled and crated the pieces and pledged to recreate the rooms elsewhere. They will re-emerge in a year or so at a government building on Rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais, about a mile from their original home.
