Where the high court feasted, frolicked, and high courtesans put their royal lovers' diamonds to the test.

The first green space constructed on an elevated viaduct.

Natural history museum celebrating biodiversity with a parade of taxidermy animals.

This Parisian café sticks almost exclusively to an ethos of reuse.

A Parisian exterminator's shop whose storefront displays stuffed rats hanging from traps.

This former “ante-chamber to the guillotine” has been refurbished to illustrate the brutal history of French justice.

A favorite Paris bar for U.S. expats, including Gershwin, Hemingway, and James Bond.

Down a cobblestone alleyway is a museum dedicated to Romanticism, with a secret garden.

The largest medical and anatomical collection in France lies hidden from the public.

An "inside out" building in the historical center of Paris, featuring Europe’s largest modern art museum.

A grotto-like lodge decorated with gilded mosaics, rocks and a noisy waterfall was the setting for the most sumptuous pleasure house of 1900s Europe.

Indents in the pavement are all that remain from a grisly death machine in Paris.

Egyptian Revival movie palace abandoned for decades and restored in 2013.

Paris' fabled purveyor of exotic taxidermy and natural history curios.

19th century pendulum and a clock restored by a rogue group of guerilla artists.

A Parisian cemetery where the elite and artistic are interred beneath an eccentric collection of tombs.

Behind the pink curtain, Au Bonheur du Jour, an art gallery of erotic archives.

Stroll through retro Paris while shopping for old postcards and discarded doll heads.

A surrealist timepiece by the artist of melting clocks.

A scandalous Art Nouveau collaboration that set Paris all atwitter at the turn of the century.

A museum on the history of Paris, including a set of Napoleon's toiletries, Proust's room, and relics of the Revolution.

A museum of magic with a Sadist past.

A mechanized clock where a man fights off a dragon, crab, and rooster.

A haunting collection of the vanished and disappearing natural world.