Massive puppet-automaton machines created by French artist collective Machines de l’Ile.

This professional clown's home is an outsider art wonderland.

Monsters and miniatures are held in equal esteem at this wondrous museum.

Ivy-covered Medieval tunnels cut through this charming town in France's Loire Valley.

This recessed garden protects thousands of mountain plants by creating its own microclimates.

Do these monsters look familiar? The gargoyles on this church are all from pop culture.

Museum on French naval history, with magnificent figureheads, a historic diving suit, and a boat used by Napoleon.

This natural French spring has been turned into a magical grotto by Roman and medieval constructions.

A lone cannonball remains lodged in the walls of the Hotel de Sens as a sober reminder of a revolution.

The recovered bones of martyrs slaughtered during The Terror are on display in this church crypt.

This surreal statue brings a famous French novel about a supernatural cad to arresting life.

Noirish green neon marks the location of one of the oldest private detective agencies in France.

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

One of the greatest maze designer’s greatest mazes.

This frog-themed restaurant was frequented by Picasso, Saint-Exupéry, and more.

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

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

This Parisian fountain is a little bit fantasy and a little bit nightclub.

The water-powered carriages are long gone, but for over a century this funicular railway has been the fastest route to the highest point in Paris.

Statue of death tucked in the University of Medicine courtyard.

The history of radiation is on safe display at the foot of a radiation science laboratory.

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

A subterranean shelter remains intact under a busy Paris railway station.

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