DESTINATION PARIS

Paris is a laurel and brickbat magnet. However cavalier some of the descriptions, travellers through the centuries are in agreement that it is one of the most stimulating capitals in the world. Paris assaults all your senses, demanding that it be seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelt. From luminescent landmarks to fresh dog crap on the streets, the city is everything it should be - the very essence of all things French.

Paris was founded on the Île de la Cité towards the end of the 3rd century BC. The city prospered in typical Roman style despite being menaced and pillaged, and by the Middle Ages had colonised both banks of the Seine. Paris acquired much of its present look in the 19th century when Napoleon commissioned Neoclassical edifices such as the Arc de Triomphe, and numerous bridges and fountains; domestic architecture evinced the substantial wealth created by rapid industrial progress. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, Parisian endeavour granted the city its Métro, civic boasting threw up an eyeful of tower, and the city kept growing. During the 1980s, Mitterand initiated the futuristic grands projets - a series of costly building projects that garnered widespread approval even when they were patent failures. Responses to glass pyramids in the Louvre and the like have ranged from appalled 'mon Dieux', to stoic Gallic shrugs, to absolute rapture, but if nothing else, the projets have invigorated dialogue about the Parisian aesthetic.

The Seine River bisects central Paris. To the north of the Seine is the Right Bank, which includes the tree-lined Avenue des Champs-Élysées running west to the Arc de Triomphe. Just east of the avenue is the massive Musée du Louvre. It's 1km further east to the Centre Georges Pompidou, a lively arrondissement (district) of museums, shops, markets and restaurants, while immediately south of here - on the Île de la Cité, the city's ancient royal and ecclesiastical centre - is the magnificent Notre Dame. South of the river is the Left Bank, where the city's most prominent landmark, the Eiffel Tower, stands imperiously. To the east, in the Saint Germain de Prés and Montparnasse districts, Paris's famous academic, artistic and intellectual milieus waft in and out of focus through a haze of Gitanes smoke.

Although Paris is not for the skint, if you resign yourself to shared bathrooms and drinking the dregs from others wine glasses, you should be able to rent a pretty neat cardboard box under Pont Neuf for yourself. Other accommodation gesturing toward affordability can be sainted, knighted and generally lauded in the districts east of the Louvre or facing south on the Left Bank. Unless you've made other arrangements for your stomach, you will have to eat in Paris. Your mantra is 'Expensive food does not taste better'. Pretend you're the only person aware of a salmonella outbreak along Boulevard de Montparnasse and head for the Marais area or the Asian cafés on the Left Bank just south of the Île de la Cité.

Map of Paris (22K)

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Attractions

Musée du Louvre

This enormous building, constructed around 1200 as a fortress and rebuilt in the mid-16th century for use as a royal palace, began its career as a public museum in 1793. As part of Mitterand's grands projets, the Louvre was revamped in the 1980s with the addition of a 21-metre glass pyramid entrance. Initially deemed a failure, the new design has since won over those who regard consistency as inexcusably boring. Vast scrums of people puff and pant through the rooms full of paintings, sculptures and antiquities, including the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory (which looks like it's been dropped and put back together). If the clamour becomes unbearable, your best bet is to pick a period or section of the Louvre and pretend that the rest is somewhere across town.

The Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel & IM Pei's glass pyramid (24K)

Two victims of cultural overdose in the Jardin des Tuileries (21K)

Centre Georges Pompidou

The Centre Georges Pompidou, displaying and promoting modern and contemporary art, is far and away the most visited sight in Paris. Built between 1972 and 1977, the hi-tech though daffy design has recently begun to age, prompting face-lifts and closures of many parts of the Centre. Woven into this mêlée of renovation are several good (though pricey) galleries plus a free, three-tiered library with over 2000 periodicals including English-language newspapers and magazines from around the world. A square just to the west attracts street musicians, Marcel Marceau impersonators and lots of unsavoury types selling drugs or picking pockets.

Notre Dame

The city's cathedral ranks as one of the greatest achievements of Gothic architecture. Notre Dame was begun in 1163 and completed around 1345; the massive interior can accommodate over 6000 worshippers. Although Notre Dame is known for its sublime balance, there are all sorts of minor anomalies as the French love nothing better than to mess with things. These include the differently shaped three main entrances, which have statues that were once coloured to make them more effective as Bible lessons for the hoi polloi. The interior is dominated by spectacular and enormous rose windows, and a 7800-pipe organ that was recently restored but has not been working properly since. From the base of the north tower, visitors with ramrod straight spines can climb to the top of the west façade and savour the views over many of the cathedral's most ferocious-looking gargoyles, not to mention a good part of Paris. Under the square in front of the cathedral, an archaeological crypt displays in situ the remains of structures from the Gallo-Roman and later periods.

Notre Dame gargoyle keeps watch on the city's streets (19K)

Notre Dame's angels admire a gentleman who has lost his head (25K)

Sainte Chapelle

Lying inside the Palais de Justice (law courts), Sainte Chapelle was consecrated in 1248 and built to house what was reputedly Jesus' crown of thorns and other relics purchased by King Louis IX earlier in the 13th century. The gem-like chapel, illuminated by a veritable curtain of 13th-century stained glass (the oldest and finest in Paris), is best viewed from the law courts' main entrance - a magnificently gilded, 18th-century gate. Once past the airport-like security, you can wander around the long hallways of the Palais de Justice and, if you can find a court in session, observe the proceedings. Civil cases are heard in the morning, while criminal trials - usually reserved for larceny or that French speciality crimes passionnel - begin after lunch.

Musée d'Orsay

Spectacularly housed in a former railway station built in 1900, the Musée d'Orsay was reinaugurated in its present form in 1986. Inside is a trove of artistic treasures produced between 1848 and 1914, including the fruits of the Impressionists and Postimpressionists. Most of their paintings and sculptures are found on the ground floor and the skylight-lit upper level, while the middle level has some magnificent rooms showcasing the Art-Nouveau movement. Nearby, the Musée Rodin displays the vital bronze and marble sculptures by Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, including casts of some of Rodin's most celebrated works. There's a shady sculpture garden out the back, one of Paris's treasured islands of calm.

Eiffel Tower (sorry)

This towering edifice was built for the World Fair of 1889, held to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution. Named after its designer, Gustave Eiffel, it stands 320m high, and was the world's tallest structure until 1930. Initially opposed by the city's artistic and literary elite - who were only affirming their right to disagree with everything - the tower was almost torn down in 1909, but was spared when it proved an ideal platform for the antennas needed for the new science of radiotelegraphy. When you're done peering upwards through the girders, you can visit any of the three public levels which can be accessed by lift or stairs. Just south-east of the tower is a grassy expanse that was once the site of the world's first balloon flights, and which is now used by teens as a skateboarding arena or by activists bad-mouthing Chirac.

The graceful base of the 7000-tonne, 320m-high Eiffel Tower (22K)

Avenue des Champs-Élysées

A popular promenade for the ostentatious aristos of old, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées has long symbolised the style and joie de vivre of life in Paris. Encroaching fast-food joints, car showrooms and cinemas have somewhat dulled the sheen, but the 2km-long, 72m-wide stretch is still an ideal place for evening walks and relishing the food at overpriced restaurants. While devouring your ham boiled in claret and touched up with spinach au gratin, calculate the number of cafés in the capital, multiply it by the capacity of the human bladder, compare it with the number of pissoirs, and pronounce Paris an absurd town.

Cimetière du Père Lachaise

Established in 1805, this is the most visited necropolis in the world. Within the manicured, evergreen enclosure are the tombs of over one million people including such luminaries as the composer Chopin; the writers Molière, Apollinaire, Oscar Wilde, Balzac, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein; the artists David, Delacroix, Pissarro, Seurat and Modigliani; the actors Sarah Bernhardt, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand; the singer Édith Piaf; and the dancer Isadora Duncan. The most visited tomb, however, is that of The Doors lead singer, Jim Morrison, who died of an overdose in Paris in 1971. One hundred years earlier, the cemetery was the site of a fierce battle between Communard insurgents and government troops. The rebels were eventually rounded up against a wall and shot, and were buried where they fell in a mass grave.

Place des Vosges

In 1605, King Henri IV decided to turn the Marais district into Paris's most snobbish residential district. The result of this initiative was Place des Vosges, a square ensemble of 36 symmetrical houses with ground-floor arcades, steep slate roofs, large dormer windows and creeper-covered walls. Only the earliest houses were built of brick; to save time, the rest were given timber frames and faced with plaster, later painted to resemble brick. Duels, fought with strictly observed formality, were once staged in the elegant park in the middle. From 1832-48 Victor Hugo lived at a house at No 6, which has now been turned into a municipal museum. Today, the arcades around the place are occupied by expensive galleries and shops, and cafés filled with people drinking little cups of coffee and air-kissing immaculate passersby.

The ornate entrance to the Bastille Metro Station (22K)

Catacombes

In 1785, it was decided to solve the hygienic and aesthetic problems posed by the city's overflowing cemeteries by exhuming the bones and storing them in the tunnels of three disused quarries. One ossuary so created is the Catacombes, without a doubt Paris's most viscerally disturbing tourist site. After descending 20m below street level, visitors can shudder through corridors filled with intermingled rib cages, bones and skulls that have been neatly stacked along the walls. People over 60 can get in for free, which says a lot about the French sense of humour. The tunnels, which were used by the Résistance during WW II as a headquarters, are south of the Seine.

Bois de Boulogne

The 8.6 sq km Boulogne Wood, on the western edge of the city, is endowed with forested areas, meandering paths, belle époque cafés, and little wells of naughtiness. Each night, pockets of the Bois de Boulogne are taken over by prostitutes and various Parisians with predacious sexual tastes. In recent years, the police have cracked down on the area's sex trade, but locals still advise both men and women not to walk through the area alone at night.

Day Trips from Paris

The relatively small region surrounding Paris - known as the Île de France (Island of France) - was where the kingdom of France began its 12th century expansion. Today it's a popular day-trip destination for Parisians and Paris-based visitors. Among the region's many attractions are woodlands ideal for hiking, skyscrapered districts endowed with sleekly functional architecture, the much-maligned EuroDisney (registered trademark!), elegant historical towns, and Versailles, the country's former political capital and seat of the royal court. The latter is the site of the Château de Versailles, the grandest and most famous palace in France. Built in the mid-1600s during the reign of Louis XIV, the château is the sort of make-believe place that would turn even Michael Jackson into a squinting myope. Apart from grand halls, bedchambers, gardens, ponds and fountains too elaborate to discuss, there's also a 75-metre-long Hall of Mirrors where nobles, dressed like ninnies, would watch themselves - and each other - while dancing.

Off the Beaten Track

Canal Saint Martin

The little-touristed Saint Martin Canal, running through the north-eastern districts of the Right Bank, is one of Paris's hidden delights. The 4.5km-long waterway, parts of which are higher than the surrounding land, was built in 1806 to link the Seine with the much longer Canal de l'Ourcq. Its shaded towpaths - specked with sunlight filtering through the plane trees - are a wonderful place for a romantic stroll or bike rides past locks, metal bridges and unassuming but well turned-out Parisian neighbourhoods.

Égouts de Paris

A city cannot grow, prosper and become truly great unless some way is found to deal with the odiferous question of its bodily wastes. Along the Seine, east of the Eiffel Tower, Paris has a unique working museum devoted to sewerage. The entrance to the museum is a rectangular maintenance hole which leads into 480m of raw sewerage tunnels replete with all sorts of vaguely familiar objects which flow beneath your feet.

Entertainment

Exhaustive entertainment listings in French are found in Pariscope (which has an eight-page section in English) and L'Officiel des Spectacles, both available each Wednesday. You can also hear recorded English-language information on concerts and other events by calling the main branch of the Paris tourist office. This service operates 24 hours a day.

Classical music, ballet and operatic performances can be heard at the city's major churches and museums, or at venues in the southern districts of the Right Bank. Visitors to this area will also hear the strains of piano accordion, saxophone, violin, guitar and drums - traditional and jazz music often played in smoky basements with hankie-sized tables. Most of the city's straight/gay discos are in and around the Louvre or the Montmartre district to the north, especially the red-light area of Pigalle. The in-crowd consider showing up before 1 am an egregious breach of good taste, but who cares?

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