📍Maison natale de Louis Braille, 13 Rue Louis Braille, 77700 Coupvray, France
1809 – 1819“I was born in this house in Coupvray, a village east of Paris among vineyards and fields above the Marne, in January 1809, the youngest of four children. My father, Simon-René, was the village saddler and harness-maker, and his workshop, with its leather, tools and the smell of polish, was part of our home. When I was three, playing there while trying to copy his work, I hurt my eye with a sharp awl. Infection followed, and by the age of five I could see nothing at all. My family refused to let my blindness shut me away. My father made me a cane so that I could find my way around the village lanes, and he hammered nails into a wooden board in the shapes of letters so that I could learn the alphabet with my fingers. The village priest, Father Palluy, taught me about nature, music and scripture, and I went to the ordinary village school alongside the sighted children, learning by listening and memorising, and often coming top of the class. Coupvray treated me as one of its own. In February 1819, at ten, I left home for the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. There I met a system of raised dots devised for soldiers to read at night, and by fifteen I had simplified it into the six-dot code that now carries my name, a way for blind people to read and write. I came home to Coupvray in the summers all my life, and I was first laid to rest in the village churchyard; in 1952 my remains were moved to the Panthéon, but my hands were left here in Coupvray, in the village that first taught me to read by touch. This house is now the Louis Braille museum.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today