The Musée Carnavalet (daily except Mon 10am–6pm; free; M° St-Paul), its entrance at 23 rue de Sévigné, off rue des Francs-Bourgeois, is a fascinating museum that charts the history of Paris from its origins up to the belle époque through an extraordinary collection of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts and archeological finds. The museum's setting in two beautiful Renaissance mansions, Hôtel Carnavalet and Hôtel Le Peletier, surrounded by attractive gardens, makes a visit worthwhile in itself. There are 140 rooms in all, impossible to visit in one go, so it's best to pick up a floor plan and decide which areas you'd like to concentrate on.The ground floor displays nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shop and inn signs and engrossing models of Paris through the ages, along with maps and plans, showing how much Haussmann's grand boulevards changed the face of the city. The recently renovated orangerie houses a significant collection of Neolithic finds, including a number of wooden pirogues unearthed during the redevelopment of the Bercy riverside area in the 1990s. On the first floor, decorative arts feature strongly, with numerous recreated salons and boudoirs full of richly sculpted wood panelling and tapestries from the time of Louis XII to Louis XVI, rescued from buildings that had to be destroyed for Haussmann's boulevards. Room 21 is devoted to the famous letter-writer Madame de Sévigné, who lived in the Carnavalet mansion and wrote a series of letters to her daughter, which vividly portray her privileged lifestyle under the reign of Louis XIV. You can see her Chinese lacquered writing desk, as well as portraits of her and various contemporaries, such as Molière and Corneille. Rooms 128 to 148 are largely devoted to the Belle Epoque, evoked through numerous paintings of the period and some wonderful Art Nouveau interiors, most stunning of which is a jewellery shop, with its peacock-green décor and swirly motifs, designed by Alphonse Mucha and reassembled here in its entirety. Also well preserved is José-Maria Sert's Art Deco ballroom, with its extravagant gold-leaf décor and grand-scale paintings, including one of the Queen of Sheba with a train of elephants. Nearby is a section on literary life at the beginning of the twentieth century, including a reconstruction of Proust's cork-lined bedroom (room 147). The second floor has rooms full of mementos of the French Revolution: models of the Bastille, original declarations of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, sculpted allegories of Reason, crockery with revolutionary slogans, glorious models of the guillotine and execution orders to make you shed a tear for the royalists as well. The post-Revolution and Napoleonic period is covered on the ground floor, in rooms 115–121; look out for Napoleon's favourite canteen, which accompanied him on his military exploits and consists of 110 pieces ingeniously contained within a case no bigger than a picnic hamper. Among the items is a full set of gold cutlery, a gold-handled toothbrush, two candelabras and a dinky geometry set – everything an emperor could possibly need while on campaign.
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