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Mon, Wed & Thurs, Sat & Sun 10am-noon & 2-5pm; ?1.25. Metro: St Guidon . From Sts Pierre et Guidon, it's just a couple of minutes' walk to the Maison d'Erasme , at rue du Chapitre 31 - walk east along the front of the church onto rue d'Aumale and it's on the right behind the distinctive red brick wall. Dating from 1468, the house, with its pretty dormer windows and sturdy symmetrical lines, was built to accommodate important visitors to the church. Easily the most celebrated of these guests was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who lodged here in 1521. By any measure, Erasmus was a remarkable man. Born in Rotterdam, the illegitimate son of a priest, Erasmus was orphaned at the age of thirteen and was then defrauded of his inheritance by his guardians, who forced him to become a monk. He hated monastic life and seized the first opportunity to leave, becoming a student at the University of Paris in 1491. Throughout the rest of his life, Erasmus kept on the move - travelling between the Low Countries, England, Italy and Switzerland - and everywhere he went, his rigorous scholarship, sharp humour and strong moral sense made a tremendous impact. He attacked the abuses and corruptions of the Church, publishing scores of polemical and satirical essays which were read all over Western Europe. He argued that most monks had "no other calling than stupidity, ignorance ? and the hope of being fed." These attacks reflected Erasmus' determination to reform the Church from within, both by rationalising its doctrine and rooting out hypocrisy, ignorance and superstition. He employed other methods too, producing translations of the New Testament to make the Scriptures more widely accessible, and co-ordinating the efforts of like-minded Christian humanists. The Church authorities periodically harassed Erasmus, but generally he was tolerated not least for his insistence on the importance of Christian unity. Luther was less indulgent, bitterly denouncing Erasmus for "making fun of the faults and miseries of the Church of Christ instead of bewailing them before God." The quarrel between the two reflected a growing schism amongst the reformers that eventually led to the Reformation. The house contains none of Erasmus' actual belongings, but a host of contemporary artifacts, all squeezed into half a dozen, clearly signed rooms. To get the most from a visit you should borrow the (English-language) catalogue from reception. The Cabinet de travail (study) holds original portraits of Erasmus by Holbein, Durer and others, as well as a mould of his skull, but the best paintings are concentrated in the Salle du Chapitre (chapterhouse), which boasts a charmingly inquisitive Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch, a gentle Nativity from Gerard David, and an hallucinatory Temptation of St Anthony by Pieter Huys. Huys was one of many artists to copy Bosch's more frantic work, though it's hard not to feel that the freakish beasts populating his painting are as much to titillate as terrify - and certainly the woman, as a symbol of temptation, is a good deal more voluptuous than anything Bosch would have painted. Moving on, the Salle Blanche (white room) contains a good sample of first editions of Erasmus' work alongside an intriguing cabinet of altered and amended texts: some show scrawled comments made by irate readers, others are the work of the Inquisition and assorted clerical censors
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