The owner was a rich woad merchant, Jean de Bernuy, a Spanish Jew who had fled the inquisition and was credit-worthy enough to be the main guarantor of the ransomed King Francis I of France after his capture at the Battle of Pavia by Charles V of Spain.

The attention of Bernuy first focused on the back of his plot where his shops stood, and on a small gothic courtyard where he had built in 1504 a great staircase tower.

Crowned with an ogee arch decorated with cabbage leaf and bordered with pinnacles, the gate conforms to the fashion of the period: flamboyant gothic.

When Bernuy started to undertake his grand Renaissance courtyard, he instructed the architect Louis Privat to move this gate to rue Gambetta and to bring it up.

Privat duly inserted into the brick wall several sculpted ornaments typical of the Renaissance: putti bearing the owner's motto and arms, and portraits medallions.