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.

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

Medieval museum built over Roman baths that features famous tapestries of a lady and a unicorn.

This French ghost town from World War II has been left as a memorial to German atrocities during World War II.

This whimsical castle of grottoes was the labor of love of a French postman, and one of the greatest achievements of outsider architecture.

This 1,300 year old monastery built atop a single rock was once only accessible depending on the whims of the tide.

Walk through spectacular aisles of hanging meat and wagon wheel–sized cheese at the world's largest wholesale food market.

An iconic and eccentric bar for "Manouche" Jazz music keeps expanding its space—and its influence.

An off-the-beaten-path boutique stuffed with an eclectic collection of upcycled goods.

This innocuous-seeming building is actually the remnant of a major wartime brothel.

In this Parisian garden's grotesque former life as a zoo it fed exotic animals to the bourgeois and put humans on exhibit.

Beggars were miraculously "cured" of their fake ailments when they returned home to this 17th century Paris slum each night.

BDSM, 1930s Style.

The floorboard scrawling of a tragic madman is on public display outside a Paris hospital, much to the dismay of its opponents.

The former home of France's controversial pop maestro is almost completely covered in ever-changing tributes and graffiti.

Remains of Roman amphitheater hidden in a sleepy quarter of Paris.

A majestic lion statue guards this Parisian botanical garden, and feeds on an unsettling item.

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

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

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

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 counter-culture bookstore like no other hides in plain sight in the streets of Paris.

One of the oldest medical collections in Europe focusing on rare surgical instruments.