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CLICHY & GARE ST-LAZARE

Drinking; Eating; Sleeping

This area stretches from the elegant residential districts of the haute bourgeoisie (upper middle class) that surround 8.25-hectare Parc de Monceau in the 8e eastward to the Gare St-Lazare, an impressive iron structure built in 1851, and then north to Clichy and the 17e arrondissement.

The 17e is a veritable kaleidoscope of different identies. Its southern neighbourhoods – with their beautiful, Haussmann-era buildings – seem almost like an extension of the 8e and 16e arrondissements, while its northern neighbourhoods assert their working-class, anarchistic identity. The wide av de Wagram, av des Ternes and av de Villiers have both residential and commercial aspects and boast some fine restaurants and shops. A maze of small streets with a pronounced working-class character stretches out around the av de Clichy, a pocket of old Paris that has somehow managed to survive.

The Clichy-Batignolles district to the west of the av de Clichy is a new quartier boasting socially integrated housing around a 10-hectare park.

MUSÉE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ Map

01 45 62 11 59; www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com; 158 blvd Haussmann, 8e; adult/7-17yr & student incl audioguide €10/7.30, under 7yr free; 10am-6pm; Miromesnil

The Jacquemart-André Museum, founded by collector Édouard André and his portraitist wife Nélie Jacquemart, is in an opulent mid-19th-century residence on one of Paris’ posher avenues. It has furniture, tapestries and enamels, but is most noted for its paintings by Rembrandt and Van Dyck and Italian Renaissance works by Bernini, Botticelli, Carpaccio, Donatello, Mantegna, Tintoretto, Titian and Uccello. Don’t miss the Jardin d’Hiver (Winter Garden), with its marble statuary, tropical plants and double-helix marble staircase. Just off it is the delightful fumoir (the erstwhile smoking room) filled with exotic objects collected by Jacquemart during her travels. The salon de thé (tearoom; 11.45am-5.45pm) is one of the most beautiful in the city.

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NICOLA’S TOP PARIS DAY

When Matthias sought to convince me a dozen years ago that France was the country we should plump for, he sensibly whisked me to Paris, where we spent a whirlwind week of perfect days…zigzagging around Daniel Buren’s zebra columns at the Palais Royal, visiting Musée Picasso and Musée Rodin, marvelling at that incredible blue at Ste-Chapelle, ogling at the view of La Grande Arche slotted like a toy brick inside the Arc de Triomphe from place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées, eating ice cream on Île St-Louis and lounging forever in the Jardin du Luxembourg on those mythical sage-green chairs we then yearned to buy for years: (Fermob was finally allowed to reproduce the 1923 original – mine’s fuschia pink, his, boy-blue). These still are my perfect Parisian days, pebble-dashed with fave-of-the-moment food/drink addresses: Le Coupe-Chou, Le Cristal del Sel, Le Pré Verre, Le Verre à Pied, the Curio Parlor Cocktail Club and Quatrehommes.

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TRANSPORT: CLICHY & GARE ST-LAZARE

Bus Place de Clichy for 68 to Opéra, Musée d’Orsay, rue du Bac, St-Germain & blvd Raspail; Gare St-Lazare for 21 to Opéra, Latin Quarter, Jardin du Luxembourg & Cité Universitaire

Metro Malesherbes, Monceau, Place de Clichy Rome, St-Lazare, Villiers, Europe

Train Gare St-Lazare

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MUSÉE NISSIM DE CAMONDO Map

01 53 89 06 50; www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr; 63 rue de Monceau, 8e; adult/18-25yr €6/4.50, under 18yr free; 10am-5.30pm Wed-Sun; Monceau or Villiers

The Nissim de Camondo Museum, housed in a sumptuous mansion modelled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, displays 18th-century furniture, wood panelling, tapestries, porcelain and other objets d’art collected by Count Moïse de Camondo, a Sephardic Jewish banker who settled in Paris from Constantinople in the late 19th century. He bequeathed the mansion and his collection to the state on the proviso that it would be a museum named in memory of his son Nissim (1892–1917), a pilot killed in action during