Moulin Radet

The Moulin Radet stands at the corner of rue Lepic and rue Girardon in Montmartre, one of two windmills left from the thirty that once worked the hill. It was built in 1717. The Debray family bought both this mill and its older neighbour, the Blute-fin, in 1809. They stopped grinding flour and turned the site into a Sunday dance garden for working-class Parisians. The family sold a small brown bread galette with milk, and that galette gave the place its name. Renoir painted the dance hall in 1876. That canvas now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. It appears again in works by Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso. One local legend has a Debray miller nailed to the sails by Cossack troops during the 1814 defence of Paris, though the story has never been verified. Today the Radet is raised above a restaurant that carries the Moulin de la Galette name, while the Blute-fin sits on private ground nearby. (Paris, Île-de-France, France)