We’re attempting to catalogue everything interesting in Paris, in no particular order.
Musée de la Chasse et la Nature
The Museum of Hunting and Nature is a strange and wonderful collection of taxidermy, ivory carved shotguns, dead butterflies and ceramics in the shape of hog’s heads, poo in drawers and boots made out of bear's feet. Their collection is weird - and they know it.
One of the things we especially love about the Musée de la Chasse is that the security guards know everything about the collection.
Engage them in conversation, they’re truly treasure troves of information, and they speak English.
BNF Richelieu
Established in 1721, it’s just one part of the national library, and this central reading room is free to access. Ridiculously decorated temple of learning, you’d think that the decoration of the place would distract you from whatever you came to the library to learn. It doesn’t though. It teases the ideas out of the top of your head.
The Musée d’Orsay
This world-famous museum, housed in a former train station from 1900, is all things turn-of-that century. Their collection focuses on artwork created between 1848 and 1914 - that's the period when telephones, telegraphs, combustion engines and electricity was invented. And Paris itself was being torn up and rebuilt, it's an incredible period of movement and change, in the world, in art, in everything!
Napoleon’s Tomb
Just in case he were to escape again, Napoleon’s tomb, in the Invalides Army Museum, Paris 7, is five materials thick. We’ve got tin, mahogany, lead, ebony and then crimson quartzite. Oh and not forgetting, his heart and his stomach are in their own little silver vases placed next to him in that first tin coffin. The project of bringing a deceased NapoBo back from St. Helena, digging him a huge crypt and sealing him shut inside multiple coffins cost the French state about 19 million euros in today’s money.
Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People is about the uprising of the French people in 1830, in the face of a megalomaniacal king, looking to take away the freedom of the press.
Restored in 2024, the references to the 1789 Revolution are plentiful, and the colours are poppin’.
Montmartre Vineyard
The vineyard in Montmartre is a rare oasis of diversity, with kiwis, raspberries, strawberries, vine peaches and a cork oak dotted throughout the grapes. The vines themselves - all 27 different varietals - are also a site of incredible diversity. Among them are well known varietals like Pinot Noir, Gamay, Chasselas, and then we have the lesser known Artaban, Vidoc, Seyve Villard and not forgetting the world famous Allemand Monarch.
Only joking, no one’s ever heard of Allemand Monarch.
Gah! What's that?
An iguana, cut open and studied in the 1880s, and then preserved at Paris’ weirdest museum, the Museum of Comparative Palaeontology and Anatomy. Housed in the corner of the Jardin des Plantes, Paris 5, this is one of the hundreds of mental skeletons and weird paper-thin specimens preserved in jars of all sizes.
Louis XIV
Louis the 14th here, in the courtyard of the Musée Carnavalet, giving it some real hip and a "What are you all looking at me for?" kind of expression, underlined by that protruding hand.
Well, friend, we're looking at you because you got yourself made in bronze, teaming a Roman tunic with some serious 17th century wig ringlets.
Place des Vosges
Place des Vosges is a totally symmetrical Royal Square commissioned by Henri IV and built between 1605 and 1612. This is the oldest square in Paris, built in brick with stone arcades around each side, and fountains in the gardens.
Former residents include writer Colette, dancer Isadora Duncan, writer Victor Hugo and sociologist Pierre Bordieu.