Every design for Maisons-Alfort

Behind the walls of the National Veterinary School of Alfort sits the Musée Fragonard, and with it the reason most people outside the town know its name. Maisons-Alfort is famous for the school, which settled centuries ago in an old manor and its estate.

That manor gave the town half its name. Peter of Aigueblanche, Bishop of Hereford, built it in the middle of the thirteenth century; the Manor of Hereford became Harefort, then Hallefort, and finally Alfort, joined at the Revolution to Maisons, from the Latin for 'the houses'. The Château de Réghat, Musée de Maisons-Alfort, keeps the local story, which has some surprising pages: Buffalo Bill stayed two months in 1905 while his Wild West Show played Paris, and on 8 September 1944 a V-2 rocket fell at Charentonneau, the first destruction ever caused by one. The Fort de Charenton, built in the mid-nineteenth century, has housed the gendarmerie's schools since 1959, and the town lost a large part of its land when Alfortville was created in 1885.

For anyone who grew up between the Marne and the railway, the whole of it is here: the school grounds, the fort and the riverbank.