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favorite books about Paris, a history of the city via the Métro. Dallas informs us that the underground train service came to Paris in 1900, after London (in the 1860s) and New York (whose elevated rapid transit service dates from 1870). But the idea of a railway system linking the city’s quartiers dates back to 1845, when it was proposed to link the Gare de Lyon to the Gare du Nord. The Universal Exposition of 1900 was the event that propelled the creation of underground trains driven by “electric traction.” Though today there are some fifteen subway lines and almost three hundred stations in Paris’s Métro system (not counting the RER commuter rail), Dallas focuses on just five lines and twelve stations to take readers to certain key spots “where we will observe a building, a street, a statue, a tombstone or some other landmark that will spark off a story that tells us a lot about the character of the city.” Dallas advises, “As you emerge from each Métro stop, look up those alleys, stare into those old shops, pass your hands over the stones in front of you” so that “you will discover what Parisians call … the ‘genius’ of their civilization.”

Métro, Boulot, Dodo

This phrase translates as “Métro, work, sleep” and refers to the daily routine—le train-train—of urban dwellers in France. In recent years it has morphed into Vélo, boulot, dodo, the vélo referring to a bike, especially with the addition of Paris’s public bicycle share program, Vélib.

Musée Carnavalet

The Musée Carnavalet (23 rue de Sévigné, 3ème) is the museum I recommend to visitors above all others, and I also suggest that it be the first museum you visit, as it is the museum of the history of Paris. The museum today consists of two homes, the Hôtel Carnavalet and the Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, which were joined in 1989. The Carnavalet is one of the most beautiful houses in the Marais and is a rare example of a Renaissance mansion still standing in Paris. It was originally built for Jacques des Ligneris, a president of the Paris parliament in the 1500s, but is better known as the home of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, who lived there from 1677 to her death in 1696. The Peletier de Saint-Fargeau mansion was built in 1688 for Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, state counselor and financial administrator.

Among the many remarkable items in the museum’s permanent collection are medieval shop signs; a model of Paris showing the bridges over the Seine, which in medieval times had houses and buildings on them; furniture from the family of Jacqueline Bouvier; paintings, drawings, and ephemera relating to the French Revolution and the July Monarchy; photographs by Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson; the ballroom of the Hôtel de Wendel, painted by José-Maria Sert and dating from 1924; the room, with original furniture, where Marcel Proust wrote In Search of Lost Time; and paintings by Paul Signac, Albert Marquet, and Maurice Utrillo. The garden of the Hôtel Carnavalet is also beautiful. I recommend buying a general guide to the museum in the bookstore before you begin your visit, as interpretive text in English is limited.

Musée Marmottan

The Musée Marmottan (2 rue Louis Boilly, 16ème / marmottan.com) has long been among my favorite Paris museums. The building itself was once a hunting lodge for Christophe Edmond Kellerman, the duke of Valmy, who sold it a few years later to Jules Marmottan, a nineteenth-century industrialist. Upon Marmottan’s death, he bequeathed the home to his son Paul, who initially devoted himself to collecting artworks of the Napoleonic era. When Paul died, he bequeathed the home to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and the museum opened its doors in 1934. In addition to a superb collection of illuminations donated by Daniel Wildenstein (son of noted gallery owner Georges), and another exceptional donation of Berthe Morisot works by Denis and Annie Rouart (Denis was the grandson of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet), the Marmottan owns the largest collection of Claude Monet’s work in the world. Among its many Monets