Nogent-sur-Seine: The Musée Camille Claudel and the Château de La Motte-Tilly

Required Activities

• Work up to room 12 of the museum, where the portraits by Camille Claudel hang, and stand in front of La Valse in the room the whole building is built around, then go back and find Persée et la Gorgone, the piece the town bought in 2008 to start the collection

• At La Motte-Tilly, find the parquet floors laid à la Versailles and the rooms where billeted troops burned them for firewood, then walk out and work out where the formal French garden ended and the English park of 1784 begins — the French part was put back only around 1910

• Walk from the museum into the old centre to the îlot Saint-Epoing and find the house where the Claudels lived for three years, then trace on the ground the chain the museum's first room lays out: Marius Ramus, who came to Nogent in 1845 and employed Alfred Boucher's father as his gardener, then Paul Dubois, then Boucher, then Claudel

• Walk to the far end of the park at La Motte-Tilly, down by the river, and find the ground where the moated feudal castle stood — it guarded a ford on the Seine a few hundred metres below, and its stone was reused in the 18th-century house you have just come out of