The story
The Musée Massey stands in a public park in the middle of Tarbes, in a Moorish-style villa with a lookout tower built to face the Pyrenees. Both the park and the villa belonged to Placide Massey, a Tarbes man who rose to run the Trianon nurseries and the kitchen garden at Versailles. From 1829 he bought up meadows north of the town and planted rare trees, and when he died in 1853 he left the garden, the house and everything else he owned in Tarbes to the town.
Two very different collections now share the building, which reopened in 2012 after ten years of closure. One is devoted to hussars, the light cavalry that spread from Hungary into armies across Europe. Marcel Boulin started it in 1955, and it has grown past 15,000 objects, shown with uniformed mannequins, weapons and paintings. The other is fine art, gathered by Achille Jubinal, a 19th-century deputy, and enriched by gifts and state deposits. Its best-known picture is The Idyll by Jean-Léon Gérôme, the French academic painter, a large canvas from 1852 shown at the Salon of 1853. The critic Théophile Gautier read it as Daphnis and Chloe, the young lovers of an ancient Greek novel.
