The Maison Picassiette is one of the more extraordinary art environments in France, and it has nothing to do with the cathedral. Raymond Isidore, a municipal cemetery sweeper, spent the last decades of his life covering every surface of his modest house and garden with mosaic fragments — pieces of broken plates, glass, tiles, and coloured stones pressed into cement. The interior walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, and garden walls are all encrusted with images: holy scenes, the New Jerusalem, views of Chartres, and abstract patterns.
The house is now a museum, open seasonally. It sits in a quiet residential neighbourhood about a 20-minute walk from the cathedral. The contrast with the grand Gothic architecture downtown is complete, but the obsessiveness and the peculiarity of Isidore's vision have their own strange power.