A weekend in Paris

Saturday: the Musée d’Orsay

The building started as a railway station in 1900, built for the Universal Exposition, which became obsolete within thirty years because its platforms were too short for modern trains. It sat abandoned, was used as a car park and a film set, and in the seventies demolition was approved to build a hotel. It was saved by a very narrow margin, partly thanks to the outcry over the demolition of the Les Halles market shortly before.

Today it holds the best Impressionist collection in the world, and seeing it in a station hall with light falling through the iron and glass vault is half the point. Go straight up to the fifth floor, where Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh are, instead of working through it in order: almost everyone arrives at the top exhausted.

And stand behind the giant clock and look at Paris through the dial, which is the best photograph in the city and it’s free.

Saturday: Père-Lachaise

When it opened in 1804 it flopped: it lay far out, in a poor district, and unconsecrated, and nobody wanted to be buried there. So the administration ran a marketing campaign you’d recognise today: in 1817 they moved the supposed remains of Molière, La Fontaine, and Abelard and Héloïse there with great ceremony. It worked. Within a few years everyone wanted to be where the celebrities were, and today a million people are buried there.

Chopin, Wilde, Piaf, Proust and Jim Morrison are there, and Morrison’s grave had a guard for years. Oscar Wilde’s has had a glass screen since 2011, and it isn’t because of idle vandalism: people kissed it with lipstick, and removing the grease from the stone eroded it a little more each time. Now they kiss the glass.

It’s free, there’s a map at the entrance, and it’s one of the calmest places in Paris.

Saturday night: a bouillon

At the end of the nineteenth century, a butcher called Duval set up enormous canteens to feed Paris’s workers cheaply and fast: broth, bouillon, a dish, and not much else, served at speed in rooms holding hundreds. There were over two hundred at one point and almost all of them vanished.

A few originals remain, with their mirrors, their brass and their art nouveau decoration untouched since 1896.

And in recent years there’s been a revival: several new ones have opened on the same idea, which is eating a classic French dish for what a set lunch costs. You don’t book, you queue on the pavement and you eat fast, at a shared table with the waiter writing your order on the paper cloth.

It’s the opposite of the romantic bistro and it’s a lot more fun.

Sunday: Versailles

Two thousand three hundred rooms and a Hall of Mirrors with three hundred and fifty-seven mirrors, which in the seventeenth century were a ruinously expensive Venetian luxury: putting them there was flexing economic muscle, not decorating. But the important thing about Versailles isn’t the size, it’s what it was for.

Louis XIV moved the court here in 1682 with a very specific political aim: to force the high nobility to live with him, away from their lands and their armies, occupied by a system of etiquette so absurd that competing for the right to hand the king his shirt in the morning became a career. While they argued over who passed him the sleeve, they weren’t plotting in the provinces.

Versailles isn’t a palace: it’s a gilded cage that worked for a century, until it didn’t. Go to the Trianon and Marie Antoinette’s hamlet, which is where the whole thing collapses under its own weight.