A History of Our Address and Its Street

“Ma chère ville presque natale.” — Romain Gary, on Nice¹⁾

We live on one of the most historically layered streets in Nice — a boulevard that has housed a prefect's legacy, a Parisian industrialist's villa, the city's oldest library, a celebrated arts club, its first public art gallery, and the formative years of one of France's greatest novelists. Boulevard Dubouchage is not a famous street in the manner of the Promenade des Anglais, but its depth of history is remarkable, and our address at No. 4 bis places us at its southern, city-centre end — steps from Place Masséna, the Promenade du Paillon, and the cultural heart of Nice.

This entry documents what we know about our building and its street: its history, its notable neighbours and residents, and the cultural life that has animated it for more than 150 years. Where the record is well-documented, we cite it directly. Where it requires informed inference, we say so clearly. The definitive archive for everything further is held at the Archives Nice Côte d'Azur, whose digitised records on the Dubouchage quarter are the primary source for this entry.

1. Historical Perspective
2. Our Street: Boulevard Dubouchage
3. The Man Behind the Name
4. Our Building: 4 bis
5. Our Neighbours: Notable Addresses on the Boulevard
6. The Cultural Life of Our Street
7. Romain Gary: Our Boulevard's Most Celebrated Connection
8. Our Location in the Quartier Carabacel
9. Walking Our Street: A Short Literary and Historical Stroll
10. Further Research
11. Quick Reference Card
12. References

Nice has belonged to several political entities throughout its long history, but it is currently part of France.

• County of Nice (1388–1792): Nice was part of the County of Nice, which was under the rule of the House of Savoy.
• Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (1720–1860): After becoming part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Nice remained under Savoyard control until it was annexed by France.
• France (1860–present): In 1860, as part of a treaty between France and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, Nice was ceded to France. It has been part of France ever since.

Although Nice was never formally part of the Kingdom of Italy (established in 1861), it was part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, which later became the Kingdom of Italy. So, while technically not a part of Italy, it shared a historical and cultural connection with the Italian state.

Boulevard Dubouchage connects Boulevard Carabacel to Avenue Jean-Médecin. It is therefore a transitional artery — one of the principal north–south axes of the Carabacel quarter, linking the elevated residential hill to the north with the commercial and civic spine of the city at the south. Our own address at No. 4 bis sits at this southern end, within two or three minutes' walk of Place Masséna and the tram network.

The street's origins are older than its current name. It was formerly called the rue then boulevard de l'Empeyrat or Empeirat — meaning “paved road” in Provençal — and it was during the great urban works of the 19th century that the municipality drove this major axis through the district, bordered by plane trees in the same manner as the quays of the Paillon and the Avenue de la Gare. Those plane trees remain one of the boulevard's defining physical features today: their canopy creates dappled shade along the pavement in summer and a bare, elegant skeleton in winter that reveals the facades behind them.

The city's regulatory plan — the plan régulateur — stopped at what is now Boulevard Dubouchage, leaving a certain urban disorder to develop beyond it to the north. This is why the boulevard still functions, architecturally and socially, as a legible boundary: to the south, the ordered grids of the 19th-century New Town; to the north, a more organic and varied fabric of residential streets climbing toward Cimiez. In its own right, the neighborhood Cimiez has a rich history Cimiez.

The boulevard carries the name of an administrator who left an unusually positive impression on the people of Nice — rare enough in the history of imposed governance to merit remembering.

Marc Joseph du Gratet, comte du Bouchage, was a native of Grenoble whom the French Empire appointed as prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes in 1803. It was he who, without friction, managed the handover of powers in 1814 to the Sardinian intendant-general Fighiéra at the Restoration. He had kept in his administration respected Niçois figures such as Benoît Bunico, his secretary-general, and Jean-Baptiste Sauvaigo, councillor of the prefecture, and thus left the Niçois with the memory of an administrator attentive to local concerns.

His portrait in oil on canvas hangs today in the Musée Masséna — a short walk from our door — where visitors can see the face of the man whose name we address every letter and parcel we send.

We now have a confirmed name and documented history for our building. The residential complex at 4 / 4 bis Boulevard Dubouchage is recorded in the PSS national architectural database and the Wikipedia inventory of Nice's palaces under the name Palais Jacqueline. ^{2) 3)}

This confirmed identification resolves the open questions of our previous entry and corrects our earlier, cautious inference that the building was likely late 19th century. It is considerably more recent — and its style is not Belle Époque but Art Deco, placing it in one of the most architecturally confident periods in Nice's history.

The year 1924 places our building squarely in the interwar period — the decade of Nice's Art Deco boom, when the city was rebuilding its identity after the First World War devastated the Belle Époque leisure world it had been built to serve. This was the same period in which the Bibliothèque Dubouchage at No. 21 bis was being redesigned (1924–25) — our home and our street's great library are therefore near-exact contemporaries, both constructed in the same twelve months of postwar cultural reconstruction.

The Art Deco style of 1924 Nice is characterised by clean geometric lines, stylised ornament, reinforced concrete construction, and a confident modernity that rejected the historical eclecticism of the Belle Époque. Where the buildings that preceded it on the boulevard and throughout the Carabacel quarter dressed themselves in stucco cornices, classical pilasters, and naturalistic ironwork, a 1924 Art Deco immeuble would present a more streamlined facade — geometric balcony railings, stepped or banded horizontal decoration, and a verticality that expressed the structural possibilities of reinforced concrete.

The name “Jacqueline” is one of dozens of female first names used for Nice's residential palaces in the early 20th century. As the Wikipedia article on Nice's palaces notes, the term palais in Nice corresponds to the usage of the Niçois language — palai — and the Italian, where palazzo designates any residential building, whether noble or of simple construction. The usage was taken into French before and after the 1860 annexation and has persisted. ⁵⁾ The city's inventory of palaces named after women includes Adeila, Alexandra, Alice, Annette, Berthe, Christine, Édith, Erika, Graziella, Irena, Jacqueline, Juliette, Louise, and many others — each name typically associated with a family member of the developer or original owner.

Who “Jacqueline” was — the wife, daughter, or other relation of whoever commissioned the building in 1924 — is a question that the building permit archives (fonds des permis de construire) held at the Archives Nice Côte d'Azur would be able to answer. The permit application should name both the commissioning party and the architect. ⁶⁾

The French address convention of bis (and ter for a third building) is worth explaining for visitors and correspondents unfamiliar with it. In France, when a second independent structure occupies the same land parcel as a numbered address, it takes the suffix bis (from Latin, meaning “twice” or “again”). Our 4 bis therefore shares its 1,059 m² land parcel with 4 Boulevard Dubouchage, but is a distinct building — accessed through an archway, courtyard gate, or passage from the primary street facade. In the case of the Palais Jacqueline complex, the two addresses together form a single residential ensemble built in 1924 on the same plot.

Our street contains an extraordinary concentration of buildings with documented historical significance. We list our neighbours in order of street number, moving from our southern end toward the northern end at Boulevard Carabacel.

At the very start of our street, where it meets Avenue Jean-Médecin, the story of Nice's first public art gallery begins. It was a private initiative — that of the antique dealer Portallier — that allowed the construction of the first monumental exhibition gallery, on the right bank of the Paillon, on Boulevard Dubouchage, specifically dedicated to the exhibition of works of art. The city's first art collections were transferred here in 1890, in the Galerie Portallier on Boulevard Dubouchage. Before the influx of donations, the building quickly became too small. By 1901 the collections had outgrown even this space and moved to a building at the corner of Avenue Notre-Dame and Rue Hancy — the precursor to today's Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret.

We therefore live at the very end of a street that was, in the 1890s, the physical address of Nice's entire municipal fine art collection.

The Palais Jacqueline — our own building — occupies the land parcel shared between No. 4 and No. 4 bis. Built in 1924 in the Art Deco style, it is a seven-storey residential building (ground floor plus six upper floors) approximately 21 metres in height, forming part of the coherent interwar building campaign that transformed the southern end of the boulevard in the 1920s. Its construction as a residential palais was part of the broader Nice practice of naming apartment buildings after female first names — a tradition documented in the Wikipedia inventory of the palaces of Nice across hundreds of buildings throughout the city.

This is one of the most important buildings on our street and one of the most historically layered structures in the whole of Nice. Louis Rambourg, a wealthy Parisian industrialist, commissioned this sumptuous residence in 1875 from Italian architect Bernardin Maraini. It later became the Villa Seigle, after the name of its new owner. In 1923, the City of Nice purchased it and had it entirely transformed into the municipal library by its architect Nicolas Anselmi, in collaboration with Clément Goyenèche. The villa was enlarged laterally and raised by a second floor, and the original facades were substantially reworked in a style approaching Art Nouveau. Of the original villa, only the staircase and the first-floor gallery would survive.

The Bibliothèque Dubouchage was inaugurated on 8 April 1925. For a long time the main library of the city, it lost that title in 1987 with the opening of the central Lamartine library. In 2001, with the opening of the new central Louis Nucéra library on the Promenade des Arts, the Dubouchage site was dedicated to the heritage collections of Nice's municipal library network. On 3 June 2005, for the library's 80th anniversary, it took the name of the writer Romain Gary.

The library has existed since 1925 but the building itself is considerably older. The Niçois, however, continue to call it the “bibliothèque Dubouchage.” In front of the library, in Square Durandy, for many years on Sunday mornings there was a postcard and coin market and a stamp exchange.

We walk past this building — our street's greatest architectural landmark — each time we leave our door heading north.

If the library at No. 21 bis represents our street's institutional cultural life, No. 27 represents its bohemian, social, and artistic soul. In 1910, at its last move, the Cercle de l'Artistique installed itself permanently at 27 Boulevard Dubouchage — fifteen years after the founding dinner at which a handful of Niçois had braved fate by sitting thirteen at a table.

The Cercle de l'Artistique had been founded in 1895 with the explicit aim of promoting Niçois artists and writers. In 1911, the villa was augmented with a small theatre and hosted major cultural events — including in 1908 an exhibition on Fragonard, in 1912 a performance of Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck, and in 1913 an exhibition of watercolours by G.-A. Mossa.

The membership list reads like a roll-call of Belle Époque European culture: by 1921, the Artistique counted among its members Jules Chéret, Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet, Giacomo Puccini, Camille Saint-Saëns, Maurice Maeterlinck, Félix Ziem, Édouard Herriot, and others. Dr Ferrier spent long hours at the piano noting the songs that elderly Niçois came to sing to him, which he would publish in his Recueil de Chansons Niçoises.

The theatre hall inaugurated in 1911 received the Comédie-Française, Colette, and Maeterlinck. And in a remarkable instance of the circle turning, in the building's later decades of decline, the artist Ben — founder of the École de Nice and a figure central to international conceptual art — rented the hall for several evenings, keeping the spirit of artistic experiment alive on our boulevard.

Today, L'Artistique continues as a City of Nice cultural venue at the same address, offering contemporary art exhibitions and cultural programming. It is accessible by Tram Lines 1 and 2 at Jean Médecin, or by Bus Line 5 at the Deloye-Dubouchage stop.

When we consider the full arc of our street's documented cultural history, what emerges is a boulevard that has been at the centre of Nice's artistic and intellectual life for over 130 years. We can summarise this history in sequence:

The name on our street's most prominent building belongs to one of the most extraordinary figures in 20th-century French literature, and his story is bound to the streets of our neighbourhood in a way that makes his name feel genuinely local rather than merely honorary.

Roman Kacew, born in 1914 in what is now Lithuania, arrived in Nice at the age of 14 with his mother. It was here that he would francise his first name to Romain. They arrived in Nice in 1927, spending a few months in a small apartment on Avenue Shakespeare, before moving to the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, where his mother had obtained the managership, on Boulevard Carlonne — today 7 Boulevard François-Grosso. They were in the Russian quarter of Nice, populated by exiles from the Tsarist era.

Romain Gary lived in Nice between 1928 and 1934. These were his formative years as a writer — the years in which he learned to write in French with the ambition and precision that would eventually earn him two Prix Goncourt, the only writer in history to achieve this distinction. ¹⁰⁾

He wrote of Nice with deep affection throughout his life, calling it — as the epigraph to this entry records — “ma chère ville presque natale”: my dear almost-native city. His autobiographical novel La Promesse de l'Aube (Promise at Dawn, 1960) is the essential literary record of his Nice years — an account of his remarkable, fiercely ambitious mother and the city that shaped his identity as a French writer and Free French aviator.

The library that bears his name sits on the boulevard Dubouchage, a former bourgeois villa that was once one of the most beautiful houses in the city. Behind its columns and palm trees lies an unexpected story: that of a major writer who was not even Niçois by birth — but who arrived as an adolescent and found his voice, his language, and his literary identity in this city.

Our address places us in the Quartier Carabacel — the second oldest urban district in Nice after the Old Town. The Carabacel quarter is bordered by Boulevard Carabacel to the east, Avenue Félix Faure to the south, Boulevard Dubouchage to the north, and Avenue Jean Médecin to the west, and its buildings with colourful facades were mostly built between 1850 and 1900. Our boulevard is therefore literally the northern boundary of this cohesive 19th-century urban block.

The etymology of “Carabacel” reaches deep into the pre-urban landscape of Nice. Car in Celtic means hill, mount, or rock. It is probable that the hill served as a quarry while the Château hill had a defensive function. During the Middle Ages, the territory of the Faubourg Saint-Jean-Baptiste appeared on plans and notarial records. The Carabacel hill was long cultivated with olive trees.

Our immediate surroundings include:

We propose this as a short walk we can take from our front door — a literary and historical promenade along the length of our own boulevard that most visitors to Nice will never make.

We begin at the southern end of the boulevard, where it meets Avenue Jean-Médecin. Before turning north, glance south: the great commercial spine of the city extends toward Place Masséna, with the tram running at street level. This is the artery that replaced the old paved Roman route (the Empeyrat) as the city's primary north–south axis.

The plane trees lining both sides create an immediate shift in atmosphere — quieter, more residential, more shaded. The building at No. 1 on the corner once housed Nice's first public art gallery, the Galerie Portallier, where the city's entire fine art collection was exhibited from 1889 to 1901. We walk past a building that was, effectively, the first Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nice.

The residential facades along this stretch — built largely between 1870 and 1900 — display the characteristic Belle Époque vocabulary of stucco detail, wrought-iron balconies, and tall shuttered windows. No. 15, the Palais Dubouchage, won the silver medal at the municipal architecture competition of 1903 — an early example of Nice's practice of formally rewarding architectural quality in private construction.

This is the building that defines our street. Stand before its facade and consider its layers: the library has existed since 1925, but the building is considerably older — a private villa of the 1870s, redesigned in the 1920s in a style approaching Art Nouveau, and bearing since 2005 the name of a Lithuanian-born, Russian-raised, French-identified writer who found his literary voice in the streets around our home.

The Square Durandy in front of the library was, for many years, the site of the Sunday morning postcard, coin, and stamp market — the kind of gentle, local, slow institution that cities lose quietly and mourn loudly. Its memory lives in the square's character: still a pleasant place to sit.

Here, in 1921, Puccini, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and Massenet were all members of the same arts club. Here, the Comédie-Française performed. Here, Maeterlinck — the Belgian Nobel laureate who would later die in Nice and who built his villa Orlamonde on the Côte d'Azur — saw his work performed. The building is now a City of Nice cultural centre. We can enter freely and see what is showing.

At the northern end of our boulevard, we reach Boulevard Carabacel. We then return south along the opposite pavement. On the return, the facades read differently: we see the building forms from the other side, the light has changed, and we begin to understand our boulevard not as a thoroughfare but as an inhabited room — with its library at one end and the city at the other, and our home quietly at the southern threshold between the two.

For those of us who wish to research our building's history more deeply, we recommend the following resources:

Print or save for use as a ready reference at our address.

Our address: 4 bis Boulevard Dubouchage, 06000 Nice, France

Our building: Palais Jacqueline — built 1924, Art Deco style, 7 storeys (~21 m), residential apartments

Our quarter: Quartier Carabacel — second oldest urban district in Nice; buildings largely 1850–1900 (our building 1924)

Our street: Named after Marc Joseph du Gratet, Comte du Bouchage — French prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, 1803–1814; known for attentive local governance

Our street's former name: Boulevard de l'Empeyrat (“paved road” in Provençal)

Key neighbours by number:

• No. 1: Former Galerie Portallier (Nice's first public art gallery, 1889–1901)
• No. 15: Palais Dubouchage (silver medal, Nice architecture competition, 1903)
• No. 21 bis: Bibliothèque Patrimoniale Romain Gary (villa 1875; library since 1925)
• No. 27: L'Artistique (arts club est. 1895; theatre 1911; members included Puccini, Fauré, Saint-Saëns)

The writer on our library: Romain Gary — born Lithuania 1914; Nice 1927–1934; Prix Goncourt 1956 and 1975 (unique in French literary history); author of La Promesse de l'Aube

Nearest tram: Stop Jean Médecin (Lines 1 and 2) — ~3 min walk south; Stop Durandy — ~2 min walk north

Research archive: Archives Nice Côte d'Azur — 2 rue Auguste Gal, Nice; archives.nicecotedazur.org

Key open question about our building: Identity of the architect and the original owner/commissioner “Jacqueline” — to be confirmed from the building permit archives (fonds des permis de construire) at the Archives Nice Côte d'Azur

1. Archives Nice Côte d'Azur. (2018). Nice, Vie des Quartiers — Dubouchage (No. 34, May–June 2018). https://archives.nicecotedazur.org/quartiers/nice-vie-des-quartiers-dubouchage/
2. PSS-Archi. (n.d.). Bibliothèque Patrimoniale Romain Gary, Nice. pss-archi.eu. https://www.pss-archi.eu/immeubles/FR-06088-42082.html
3. Bibliothèques de Nice / BMVR. (2025). Bibliothèque Patrimoniale Romain Gary. bmvr.nice.fr. https://bmvr.nice.fr/Default/bibliotheque-patrimoniale-romain-gary.aspx
4. Nice Presse. (2024, July 22). À la découverte des 1000 trésors de la bibliothèque Romain-Gary, dans le centre de Nice. nicepresse.com. https://nicepresse.com/a-la-decouverte-des-1000-tresors-de-la-bibliotheque-romain-gary-dans-le-centre-de-nice/
5. France Bleu Côte d'Azur. (2024, June 17). Pourquoi la plus ancienne bibliothèque de Nice s'appelle-t-elle Romain Gary? francebleu.fr. https://www.francebleu.fr/emissions/les-pourquoi-de-la-cote-d-azur/pourquoi-la-plus-ancienne-bibliotheque-de-nice-s-appelle-t-elle-romain-gary-3341173
6. France Bleu Côte d'Azur. (2025, November 14). Pourquoi la plus vieille bibliothèque de Nice porte le nom de Romain Gary. francebleu.fr. https://www.francebleu.fr/emissions/1000-raisons-d-aimer-la-cote-d-azur/pourquoi-la-plus-vieille-bibliotheque-de-nice-porte-le-nom-de-romain-gary-6125823
7. Catalogue Collectif de France (CCFr) / Bibliothèque Nationale de France. (n.d.). Bibliothèque Patrimoniale Romain Gary, Nice. ccfr.bnf.fr. https://ccfr.bnf.fr/portailccfr/ark:/16871/00211769
8. Provence 7. (2022). Carabacel — Quartier-Village à Visiter à Nice. provence7.com. https://www.provence7.com/a-a-z-des-articles/carabacel-quartier-village-a-visiter-a-nice-06/
9. Chez Lola Gassin. (2016, June 23). L'Artistique, devenu Théâtre de la Photographie et de l'Image. chezlolagassin.com. https://chezlolagassin.com/lartistique-devenu-theatre-de-la-photographie-et-de-limage/
10. Théâtres de la Ville de Nice. (n.d.). L'Artistique — Centre d'Arts et de Culture & Espace Ferrero. theatres.nice.fr. https://theatres.nice.fr/lieu/artistique-l-centre-darts-et-de-culture-espace-ferrero
11. Archives Nice Côte d'Azur / Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice. (2021). La Bataille des Beaux-Arts — Art et Politique au XIXe Siècle. archives.nicecotedazur.org. https://archives.nicecotedazur.org/expo/la-bataille-des-beaux-arts-art-et-politique-a-nice-au-xixe-siecle/
12. Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice. (2024). Dossier de Presse — La Bataille des Beaux-Arts. musee-beaux-arts-nice.org. https://www.musee-beaux-arts-nice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/dossier-presse-expo-bataille-beaux-arts.pdf
13. Cultivez-vous Nice. (n.d.). Le Musée des Beaux-Arts au Croisement de l'Art et de la Politique à Nice au XIXe Siècle. cultivez-vous.nice.fr. https://cultivez-vous.nice.fr/patrimoine/le-musee-des-beaux-arts-au-croisement-de-lart-et-de-la-politique-a-nice-au-xixe-siecle/
14. Terres d'Écrivains. (n.d.). Sur les Pas des Écrivains: Romain Gary à Nice, Aix, Paris. terresdecrivains.com. http://www.terresdecrivains.com/romain-gary-a-nice-aix-paris
15. Mon Quartier. (2023, January 5). Le Flamboyant Romain Gary. monquartier.biz. https://www.monquartier.biz/article-23082847.html
16. ICI / France Bleu. (2023). Nice, Vie des Quartiers: Romain Gary et la Bibliothèque Dubouchage. francebleu.fr.
17. BMVR Nice. (n.d.). Présentation de la bibliothèque Dubouchage. bmvr.nice.fr. http://vnicbibhbr01.cloudapp.net/EXPLOITATION/bmvr.aspx
18. Agence Gounod. (2023). Le Boulevard Dubouchage à Nice: Architecture et Vie de Quartier. agencegounod.com.
19. Archives Nice Côte d'Azur. (n.d.). Fonds Cadastraux et Permis de Construire. archives.nicecotedazur.org. https://archives.nicecotedazur.org
20. PSS Architecture Database. (n.d.). Palais Jacqueline — 4 Boulevard Dubouchage, Nice (reference FR-06088-42084). pss-archi.eu. https://www.pss-archi.eu/immeubles/FR-06088-42084.html
21. Wikipedia (French edition). (2025). Liste des palais de Nice. fr.wikipedia.org. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_palais_de_Nice
22. Wikipedia (French edition). (2025). Palais de Nice. fr.wikipedia.org. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_de_Nice
23. Regional Heritage Inventory PACA. (n.d.). Immeubles jumelés dont immeuble dit Villa Jacqueline — 18 et 20 rue Foncet, Nice (reference IA06004254). dossiersinventaire.maregionsud.fr. https://dossiersinventaire.maregionsud.fr/dossier/IA06004254

Last reviewed: March 2026. This entry is a living document — we welcome corrections, additions, or archival discoveries from any resident or researcher who can deepen the record of our address.

This entry draws primarily on the digitised archives of Nice Côte d'Azur, the PSS national architectural database, the Wikipedia inventory of the palaces of Nice, and published histories of the Carabacel quarter. The building's name (Palais Jacqueline), construction date (1924), architectural style (Art Deco), and physical dimensions are now confirmed. The identity of the architect and the person after whom the building is named remain open questions for further archival research.