Art, Empire, and Iron: The 7th Arrondissement Walk

Musée d'Orsay

A Beaux-Arts railway station turned temple of Impressionism, holding the world's largest collection of Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, and their contemporaries.

You are standing in front of what was, in 1900, the most modern railway station in the world. The Gare d'Orsay had electric trains, escalators, and a hotel with 370 rooms. Victor Laloux dressed the steel and glass in a Beaux-Arts stone façade so it would not clash with the Louvre across the river. By 1939, trains had grown too long for its platforms and the station fell into disuse.

It sat empty for decades. In 1978, the government decided to turn it into a museum that would bridge the gap between the Louvre's classical collection and the modern art in the Pompidou Centre. François Mitterrand opened it in December 1986. Look up at the great clock set into the façade.

Inside, under a soaring barrel-vaulted ceiling, you can see Monet's water lilies, Renoir's Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, and Van Gogh's self-portraits. The collection runs from 1848 to 1914 and includes painting, sculpture, photography, and furniture. Take a moment with the Beaux-Arts stonework before we head west.

Musée Rodin

Rodin's sculptures fill an 18th-century mansion and its garden, where The Thinker sits under the trees with the gilded dome of Les Invalides rising behind it.

You have just walked through the quiet embassy streets of the 7th arrondissement. The Musée Rodin occupies the Hôtel Biron, a rococo mansion completed in 1732 by the architect Jean Aubert. Rodin discovered the building in 1908, when it sat nearly abandoned and subdivided into rented rooms. He took four ground-floor rooms as a studio, then the whole house by 1911.

Other tenants included Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, and the dancer Isadora Duncan. In 1916, Rodin donated his entire collection to the French state on the condition it remain here. The museum opened in 1919. Walk into the garden.

The bronze Thinker sits on a pedestal under the trees, and behind it the gilded dome of Les Invalides catches the light. Rodin originally called this figure The Poet. It was meant to be Dante, perched above the Gates of Hell, leaning forward to observe the damned. The monumental cast in front of you dates from 1904.

Take your time in the garden. The Kiss, Balzac, and The Burghers of Calais are here too.

Les Invalides

Louis XIV's hospital for wounded soldiers, crowned by Hardouin-Mansart's golden dome that shelters Napoleon's tomb.

The gold dome you saw from Rodin's garden belongs to Les Invalides. Louis XIV ordered it built in 1670 as a hospital and home for soldiers wounded in his wars. The architect Libéral Bruant laid out the complex, and in 1676 the young Jules Hardouin-Mansart was brought in to design the royal chapel. He gave it a dome covered in gold leaf that rises 101 meters.

Until the Eiffel Tower went up in 1889, this was the tallest building in Paris. Inside, beneath the dome, Napoleon Bonaparte lies inside six nested coffins of tin, mahogany, lead, ebony, oak, and red porphyry. His remains were brought back from Saint Helena in 1840, but the tomb took another twenty-one years to complete. The circular gallery around the sarcophagus shows reliefs of his civil reforms, the Napoleonic Code among them.

His brothers, his son, and several of his marshals are buried here too. Step inside if you have time. The Army Museum occupies the wings of the complex.