Maison de la dernière cartouche

On 1 September 1870, the day of the Battle of Sedan, a few dozen French marine infantrymen held an inn at the edge of the village of Bazeilles against Bavarian troops, firing from its windows until their ammunition was all but gone. The house, then owned by the Bourgerie family, is now a small museum, and the room where the defence ended has kept the marks of the fight.

The painter Alphonse de Neuville, who had served in that war himself, turned the episode into Les Dernières Cartouches, The Last Cartridges. It was a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1873 and was reproduced in prints for decades. The original canvas hangs here, in the house it depicts.

The building was bought in 1899 through a public subscription organised by the Paris newspaper Le Gaulois. Its cases hold weapons, uniforms and objects picked up on the battlefield or given by soldiers' descendants, and the village ossuary, built in the 1870s for the dead of the fighting, lies close by.