Musée Carnavalet

Push through the gate on rue de Sévigné and the noise of the Marais drops away. Your shoes meet old paving stones, uneven and worn smooth. Ahead, a courtyard opens up, framed by pale limestone walls. In the centre stands a bronze king in Roman armour. This is the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris. It does not tell the story of France or of art. It tells the story of one city, its streets, its shops, and its people.

The building around you is one of the oldest private mansions left in Paris. It was built in the sixteenth century, during the French Renaissance. That was a time when French builders borrowed ideas from Italy: balanced façades, classical columns, carved figures. Look up at the walls of the courtyard. Carved reliefs show the four seasons and other allegorical figures. They are traditionally linked to the workshop of Jean Goujon, one of the great sculptors of that age.

The name has a curious origin. An early owner of the house was a Breton widow named Kernevenoy. Parisians found that name hard to say. Over time, it was worn down in everyday speech until it became Carnavalet. So the museum carries the mispronounced name of a noblewoman from Brittany. It is a small reminder that cities shape words, just as they shape stone.

The most famous resident arrived in the seventeenth century. Madame de Sévigné rented this house in 1677 and lived here until her death in 1696. She is remembered for her letters, especially those written to her daughter. In them she described court gossip, Parisian life, the weather, and her own feelings. Today they are read as classics of French prose. The street outside now carries her name.

Now turn to the statue in the courtyard. It shows Louis XIV, the Sun King, and it is the work of the sculptor Antoine Coysevox. Here is a detail many visitors miss. This bronze is one of the few royal statues in Paris to survive the French Revolution. During those years, crowds pulled down many images of kings and melted them. This one stood in a less public place, and it came through intact.

In the nineteenth century, Paris was being rebuilt on a vast scale. Baron Haussmann was cutting wide new boulevards through the old medieval city. Whole neighbourhoods were disappearing. At his urging, the city bought this mansion in the 1860s to save a record of what was being lost. The museum opened to the public in 1880. Later, the neighbouring Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, from the late seventeenth century, was joined to it.

The museum closed for a long renovation in 2016 and reopened in 2021. The work made the rooms brighter and easier to follow. Displays now run roughly in time order, from prehistory to the present day. Some objects are hung lower, at the eye level of children. The renovation also opened a new route through the cellars, where the oldest finds are kept.

Those cellars hold a real surprise. Down there you can see wooden canoes from the Neolithic period, the late Stone Age. They were found in the 1990s during building work at Bercy, in the east of Paris. Each one was carved from a single tree trunk. Thousands of years before Notre-Dame, people were already paddling along the Seine here. Paris, it turns out, began as a river settlement long before it became a city.

Back upstairs, one of the most loved rooms is full of old shop signs. Before most people could read, shops hung painted or wrought-iron signs to show what they sold. A boot meant a cobbler. A golden key meant a locksmith. Some signs are playful, some are strange, and some are very large. Walking among them feels like walking down a street of the old city, looking up at the shopfronts.

The Revolution has a whole sequence of rooms to itself. There are paintings of the storming of the Bastille, portraits of revolutionaries, and everyday objects from those years. One famous piece is a model of the Bastille prison. After the fortress was demolished, an entrepreneur named Pierre-François Palloy had models carved from its own stones. He sent them around France. They were souvenirs, and also a kind of political message.

Later rooms carry you into the Belle Époque, the years around 1900. Here you will find the complete interior of a jewellery shop designed by Alphonse Mucha, the Czech artist known for his flowing Art Nouveau posters. It was made for the jeweller Georges Fouquet. There are peacocks, curving bronze, and glowing stained glass. Nearby, a ballroom painted by José Maria Sert shows gold and sepia scenes of the Queen of Sheba's procession.

There is also a quieter room that writers seek out. It holds the bed and furniture of Marcel Proust, the novelist who wrote In Search of Lost Time. Proust worked mostly in bed, often through the night, in a room lined with cork to block out noise. The furniture here is modest and dark. It is easy to pass by quickly. Pause for a moment, and imagine the pages that were written in that bed.

When you come back out into the courtyard, look again at the walls around you. The carved seasons, the tall windows, the paving under your feet. They have watched Renaissance owners, a letter-writing marquise, and the city's own historians pass through. Outside the gate, the Marais carries on: cafés, bicycles, voices in many languages. The museum holds the past of Paris. The street outside is still adding to it.