Nicolas Flamel's House

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Fans of Harry Potter stories will be familiar with the many colorful characters featured in these books, and probably will assume that these characters are fictional. That may well be, for a majority of these characters (only the author of the books would know for sure), but at least one of them is 100% real: Nicolas Flamel, the alchemist colleague of Professor Dumbledore, mentioned in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's (Sorceror's) Stone. In order to prove this, I've provided a picture of Nicolas Flamel's house, above.

Besides being the house in which Nicolas Flamel lived, this house, which is now nearly six hundred years old, is also the oldest house in Paris, and a historic monument. Flamel lived here with his wife, Pernelle, and provided free lodging for the poor in exchange for a daily prayer (Flamel was a pious Catholic).

There's a great deal of mystery, legend, and history surrounding Flamel, which I won't go into here. Some even think he and his wife are still alive … hmm.

The house is on a tiny, narrow street that is rather dark, whence the need to photograph it with a wide-angle lens, leading to the wild perspective you see in this photo. The name of the street? Sorry, I'll leave that for you to figure out. It's hard to find even when you know the name of the street.

Nicolas no longer lives in this house, but there's a nice restaurant on the premises, where you can eat dinner in the same rooms that the famous alchemist and philanthropist once occupied. The facade of the building is essentially as it was 600 years ago, but the restaurant inside is much more modern, of course.

Photographed in the spring of 2003.