Musée Carnavalet

The Carnavalet is not an art museum first, it is the museum of the history of Paris, and it has been telling the city's story since 1880 from inside two Renaissance mansions in the Marais. The older one, the Hotel Carnavalet, was once home to the letter-writer Madame de Sevigne, whose 17th-century correspondence is a portrait of her age.

Art comes in because so much of Paris's history is painted. The rooms are full of views of the city as it changed, portraits of the people who shaped it, and whole interiors rescued from demolished buildings and rebuilt here, from Art Nouveau shopfronts to Marcel Proust's actual cork-lined bedroom, moved in wholesale. The French Revolution has its own dense rooms of relics and paintings.

After a long renovation the museum reopened in 2021, its permanent collection still free to enter, so you can walk from a medieval boat-shaped sign through Revolutionary Paris to Proust's cork-lined bed in a single afternoon.