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Revisiting Paris’s history museum
Imagine air so cold it takes the feeling from your fingertips. This is the kind of weather that always comes to mind when I think of Paris’s history museum, le mus é e Carnavalet . When I was a student here in Paris, a friend and I often used to stroll around the beautiful Marais neighborhood. When we got cold in winter, the musée Carnavalet was a warm refuge for us. The seemingly endless permanent collection rooms were heated and free, and full of amazing, often very strange objects. Housed in two old h ô tels particuliers (mansions built in the 16 th to 18 th centuries that are a signature of Marais architecture), the museum possesses an eclectic collection of items tied to Paris’s history. Some are fairly expected: paintings, maps, charts, city seals and street signs, for instance. Others, though, veer towards the odd. There’s Voltaire’s surprisingly tacky chair, a slipper that probably belonged to Marie-Antoinette, a model of the Bastille carved from a stone of the actual