Nancy in 3 days

Eugène Corbin, the Magasins Réunis department-store magnate who quietly bankrolled half the École de Nancy, willed his villa and his collection to the city in 1935; it opened as a museum in 1964. What separates it from every other Art Nouveau holding is that nothing sits isolated in a vitrine — you move through reassembled interiors, up a stair lit by Jacques Gruber's stained glass, into rooms where furniture, lamps, glass and textiles were all built to argue the same case. Upstairs is the reason you came: Émile Gallé's bed *Aube et Crépuscule* (1904), his last work, a moth folding its wings in mother-of-pearl and glass marquetry at the foot, another opening them at the head. Downstairs, Eugène Vallin's carved dining room and Louis Majorelle's orchid and water-lily gilt-bronze mounts set out the movement's two temperaments — heavy organic joinery against pure drawn line. Daum cameo vases and Prouvé ironwork fill the rest. Don't skip the garden. The timber-and-glass aquarium pavilion (Weissenburger, 1904) and Vallin's funerary monument stand where most visitors have already turned back toward the exit. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10:00–18:00; closed Monday and Tuesday and on 1 January, 1 May, 14 July, 1 November and 25 December. Around €6, reduced €4, free for under-12s and on the first Sunday of the month — which is also when it is busiest. The address, 36–38 rue du Sergent Blandan, sits in a calm bourgeois quarter about 25 minutes' walk southwest of Place Stanislas. Combine it with the Villa Majorelle nearby, which runs on limited-capacity timed entry, so book ahead; a joint ticket exists. Afterwards, eat at the Brasserie Excelsior by the station — a 1911 room with Majorelle furniture and Gruber glass — and take home a tin of bergamotes de Nancy rather than the museum postcards.

Opened in 1911 and classed a monument historique since 1976, the Excelsior was built by Lucien Weissenburger and Alexandre Mienville as the grand café of Nancy's new station quarter, and it remains the most complete École de Nancy interior you can actually sit down in. Jacques Grüber did the stained glass, Louis Majorelle the mahogany fittings and banquettes, and Daum the frosted-glass ceiling lamps that pool light across the plaster garlands overhead — all original, none of it behind rope. Open daily from 8am to midnight, kitchen running straight through, which is rarer in Nancy than you'd expect. Eat the choucroute garnie (around €25) or the côte de bœuf for two (about €60), both fixtures since the 1920s. The seafood counter out front shucks Breton oysters from September; the plateau runs €35–60. Starters sit at €11–17, mains €20–32, the weekday lunch formule around €24. Drink the local grey wine — a Côtes de Toul gris, roughly €6 a glass — and finish with a mirabelle eau-de-vie, distilled from the plum that defines Lorraine. The insider move is breakfast: arrive at 8am for coffee and a croissant (about €7) when the room is empty, the morning light angles through Grüber's glass, and the staff will let you wander with a camera. In the evening, ask for the rear salle rather than the bar side — quieter, and the ceiling reads better from there. You're directly opposite Gare de Nancy-Ville, ten minutes' walk from Place Stanislas. The surrounding streets — rue Raugraff, rue Chanzy, rue Mazagran — carry a dense run of Art Nouveau facades, several by Weissenburger himself; the Musée de l'École de Nancy sits 2km south in Eugène Corbin's old villa.

Built in 1901–02 and known to the family as Villa Jika — from the initials of Majorelle's wife, Jeanne Kretz — this was Nancy's first wholly Art Nouveau house, and the only one where a single client commissioned every trade at once. Majorelle hired the young Parisian architect Henri Sauvage, with Lucien Weissenburger supervising on site, then handed the interior to the École de Nancy's best: Alexandre Bigot's glazed stoneware on the porch and chimneys, Jacques Gruber's glass, Francis Jourdain's painted friezes, and his own furniture and wrought iron. Slow down at three points. The staircase window, *Les Blés*, is Gruber at full strength: heavy leading, opalescent glass, wheat stems bending as if in wind. The dining-room fireplace in Bigot sandstone carries the honesty-plant motif that recurs throughout the house. And the bannister — iron drawn out into a sapling that pulls the eye up three floors. Then walk around to the garden side for the north-facing studio window; the rear elevation is a looser, stranger building than the street front, and most visitors never see it. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am–1pm and 2pm–6pm. Entry €6, reduced €4, free on the first Sunday of the month, or about €9 on a joint ticket with the Musée de l'École de Nancy, ten minutes' walk away on rue du Sergent Blandan. Guided visits run roughly hourly in French; book ahead in summer, when slots fill by mid-morning. The house stands in the quiet villa quarter south of the centre near parc Sainte-Marie, laid out when this was still open ground and Nancy's industrialists were building outward. Afterwards, eat at Brasserie Excelsior on rue Henri-Poincaré — 1911, Gruber glass overhead, Majorelle woodwork, and a cold plateau of oysters served beneath the lot.

The jazz here is far younger than the architecture holding it. Emmanuel Héré laid out this quarter in the 1750s as connective tissue between Stanisław Leszczyński's new royal square and the medieval Ville-Vieille, and the vaulted stone cellars under those townhouses turned out to be superb rooms for a trio. Nancy Jazz Pulsations, founded in 1973, made the habit permanent — but the music does not stop when the festival packs up. Rue des Maréchaux itself is the rue gourmande: roughly forty kitchens in three hundred metres, most serving 12:00–14:00 and 19:00–22:00, closed Sunday evening and usually Monday. Eat quiche lorraine made properly — eggs, cream, lardons, no cheese, €9–13 — then a baba au rhum, invented in this city for Stanislas, and finish with a mirabelle eau-de-vie at €5–7 a glass, from the plum harvest that defines Lorraine every late August. Buy bergamotes de Nancy, the amber bergamot squares carrying an IGP since 1996, from a confiseur on Rue Gambetta; about €8 a tin. Bars open around 18:00 and run to 02:00, later Thursday through Saturday, when the 50,000 students of the Université de Lorraine decide the night is worth extending. A demi runs €3.50–5, cocktails €9–13; live sets start 21:00–21:30, free or €5–10 at the door, and the smaller cellar rooms fill by the second number. Insider tip: during NJP in October the Chapiteau in the Parc de la Pépinière sells tickets at roughly €25–45, but the festival's off-programme is free and scattered through these streets — and it is where the visiting musicians end up once their own sets are done. Come at 23:00, not 20:00, and stand near the bar rather than the stage.

Thirty kilometres east of Nancy sits the château the Dukes of Lorraine built before they built Place Stanislas. Duke Léopold began it in 1703 and handed the work to Germain Boffrand, a pupil of Hardouin-Mansart, who stretched a Versailles-length façade of pale limestone above the Vezouze. Stanislas Leszczyński — deposed king of Poland, father-in-law of Louis XV, duke here from 1737 — then turned it into an Enlightenment court: Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet spent long seasons in these rooms, and she died in one of them in 1749. A fire on 2 January 2003 gutted the south wing, and the restoration has run ever since, so a visit means watching a building come back rather than filing past a finished one. The Parc des Bosquets, terraced down toward the water, is free and open dawn to dusk. The museum and restored state apartments run roughly 10:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00, closed Tuesdays, about €7 adult and free under 12; winter hours contract, so confirm the day before. Give the faïence rooms proper time — Lunéville-Saint-Clément pottery was a European export name, and the lions and pug dogs modelled in glazed earthenware are the collection's oddest pleasure. Insider tip: the ticket desk sends everyone upstairs, but the former stables house the Musée de la Moto et du Vélo, a few hundred machines that almost nobody in the courtyard knows is there. Afterwards, walk ten minutes into the grid of streets the dukes laid out to reach the 1785 synagogue, one of the oldest still standing in France. Trains from Nancy-Ville take about 20 minutes and cost under €10; eat pâté lorrain from a town charcuterie, and in late August mirabelles from the market.

Metz sits 55 km north of Nancy, an easy 40-minute train ride from Nancy-Ville, and it makes the perfect counterweight to Nancy's Art Nouveau elegance — where Nancy is 18th-century royal planning and 1900s ornament, Metz is Gallo-Roman bones, Germanic imperial swagger and 21st-century architecture within a single afternoon's walk. Start at the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne, begun in 1220 and completed around 1520, nicknamed "la Lanterne du Bon Dieu" for its 6,500 m² of stained glass — the largest expanse of any French cathedral. The glazing spans five centuries: Hermann von Münster's 14th-century west rose, Valentin Bousch's Renaissance panels, and, in the north transept and the ambulatory chapels, Marc Chagall's 1958–1968 windows in that unmistakable cobalt blue. Open daily 08:00–18:00, free entry; the treasury and crypt cost €4. Go between 14:00 and 16:00 on a clear day, when western light floods the nave. Then walk fifteen minutes to the Centre Pompidou-Metz, opened in 2010 to a design by Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines — a hexagonal timber lattice roof modelled on a Chinese woven hat, with three tubular galleries framing pointed views of the cathedral and the station. Open Wednesday–Monday 10:00–18:00, closed Tuesdays; admission €7–12 depending on the exhibition programme, free for under-26s. The insider move: skip the museum café for the Marché Couvert opposite the cathedral, a converted 1785 episcopal palace, open Tuesday–Saturday 07:00–19:00 (Sunday to 13:00). Buy a mirabelle tart and Lorraine pâté en croûte for a few euros. Then cut into the Quartier Impérial behind the station — the vast, granite Wilhelmine district built 1902–1918, an oddly beautiful UNESCO-listed monument to imperial German ambition that most day-trippers never notice.

Twenty kilometres west of Nancy the limestone scarp above Toul carries a vineyard the bishops and Cistercians planted long before phylloxera and two wars nearly erased it: some 1,000 hectares in 1900, barely twenty by the 1950s, around 110 today. VDQS in 1951, full AOC in 1998 — France's most northerly appellation for red wine, whose signature is not red at all. Gris de Toul is pressed straight off gamay with pinot noir and a little auxerrois: pale, saline, bone dry, nearly transparent in the glass, and served cold. The reds are lean, high-acid pinot noir that reward a cool year; the whites are auxerrois, sold here under the Moselle name. The villages string along the hillside — Bruley, Lucey, Blénod-lès-Toul, Mont-le-Vignoble, Charmes-la-Côte, Bulligny, Domgermain. Bruley is the base: the Maison de la Vigne sits below the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, and the walk up to the calvary above the village, with the Moselle plain opening out beneath the vines, is the reason to make the trip rather than buy the bottle in Nancy. Cellar doors typically open 10:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00, Tuesday to Saturday, plus Sunday mornings in summer; phone ahead in January and during harvest in mid-September. Tastings are free. Reckon on €7–10 for a bottle of gris, €9–13 for pinot noir, €18–25 for mirabelle eau-de-vie at 45%. Eat quiche lorraine, pâté lorrain in its pastry case, and local tomme. Insider tip: keep a glass of gris for the mirabelle tart at the end — the wine's tension cuts the sugar better than any dessert wine, and no vigneronne will charge you for the pour. Toul itself repays an hour: the flamboyant façade of Saint-Étienne and one of the largest cloisters in France. Trains from Nancy take about twenty minutes for roughly €7; the vineyards are a five-to-eight-kilometre ride from the station.

The macaron de Nancy is not the pastel sandwich sold in Paris. It is a single round of almond, sugar and egg white — crackled crust, chewy middle, no filling, no colouring — baked to a recipe two Benedictine sisters of the Dames du Saint-Sacrement took with them when the Revolution dissolved their convent in 1793 and they had to earn a living. The name followed them, and the house on rue Gambetta has worked that three-ingredient formula ever since. The biscuits still come out in pairs, joined at the base where they spread on the tray. The other half of the counter is mirabelle. Lorraine grows the overwhelming majority of the world's crop, picked over roughly three weeks from mid-August, and the tart is the plainest possible treatment: halved plums packed cut side up on thin pastry, barely sweetened, the fruit going jammy at the edges. Outside those weeks it is made with preserved fruit, so it is worth asking which you are getting. Open Tuesday to Saturday 9.30–19.00, Monday 14.00–19.00, closed Sunday. Reckon on about €9.50 for a paper sachet of a dozen macarons, €15 for the decorated tin, €4 a slice for the tart, and around €7 for a box of bergamotes de Nancy — the hard, bergamot-scented boiled sweets that are the city's other protected speciality. Buy the sachet rather than the tin: identical biscuit, and they are at their best within about forty-eight hours, before the crust gives up its snap. Rue Gambetta runs a minute west of Place Stanislas, Emmanuel Héré's square of 1752–55 with Jean Lamour's gilded ironwork folded into the corners, on the seam between the eighteenth-century Ville-Neuve grid and the medieval upper town. Take the macarons through the arch behind the square and eat them in the Parc de la Pépinière.