The Paris Underworld: Two Days Among the Dead

Drop your bags at your hotel and get your bearings. The Latin Quarter or the Marais put you within easy reach of everything on today's circuit — choose somewhere with thick walls and a narrow staircase if you want to stay in the mood.

Begin underground, in the most literal sense. In the 1780s, Paris was running out of burial space and its overflowing cemeteries were poisoning the city's wells. The bones of roughly six million people were transferred over the following decades into a vast network of former limestone quarries south of the city. What you walk through today is a carefully arranged ossuary — walls lined with femurs and skulls — that was given its ceremonial character during the Revolutionary period. The silence down here is absolute. The temperature never changes. Take your time.

Resurface into the daylight of the Latin Quarter and head to this magnificent Art Nouveau dining room on Rue Racine — carved wood, tiled walls, mirrors that have reflected the faces of Parisians for well over a century. It is exactly the kind of place that feels continuous with the city's history: unhurried, rooted, genuinely old. Order whatever the kitchen is running with wine.

A short walk south brings you to Montparnasse Cemetery, one of the three great municipal cemeteries Napoleon ordered laid out beyond the city's edges in 1804 to replace the churchyards. The graves here read like a roll-call of the modern Parisian mind: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre share a stone; Guy de Maupassant and Samuel Beckett are a short walk apart. The cemetery's quieter corners have that particular stillness of a place where the city's roar simply stops.

Cross back to the Île de la Cité for the late-afternoon light through Sainte-Chapelle's extraordinary stained glass. Louis IX built this royal chapel in the 1240s partly to house what was believed to be the Crown of Thorns — a relic purchased at enormous cost. The upper chapel is almost entirely glass: 1,113 panels telling biblical stories, and in late afternoon the light turns deep amber and crimson. After a day among tombs, there is something moving about standing inside what is essentially a lantern built to honour suffering.

Few restaurants in the world can claim a history reaching back to 1582. La Tour d'Argent, on the Left Bank's Quai de la Tournelle, has fed kings, survived revolutions and maintained a legendary wine cellar through it all. The view over Notre-Dame and the Seine at night is theatrical. This is the right evening for something ceremonial — the kind of dinner the 19th century would have approved of.

End the evening at this bar on Avenue Victoria whose name — The Last Bar Before the End of the World — suits the occasion rather well. It occupies a dramatic old space and draws a crowd with a literary and fantastical sensibility. Order something dark, find a corner, and let the name do its work.

The Conciergerie began as a royal palace and became, during the Terror of 1793–94, the last address of more than 2,700 people before they were sent to the guillotine. Marie Antoinette spent her final weeks in a cell here. The building's medieval towers still loom over the Seine as they have for seven centuries. Walking through it is a sober and necessary reminder of what political violence looks like when it is given administrative form.

Just steps from the Conciergerie, beneath the parvis of Notre-Dame, lies one of Paris's least-visited and most absorbing spaces. The Archaeological Crypt preserves the layers of the city's foundation in situ — Gallo-Roman walls, medieval cellars, remnants of the 18th-century Hôtel-Dieu — all beneath the square where pilgrims have gathered for a thousand years. It is history read downward, stratum by stratum.

A few minutes' walk from Notre-Dame along the Quai de Montebello, Café Panis has a terrace that looks straight across the river at the cathedral's south face. Sit outside if the October air allows, or inside at one of the small tables. A proper French lunch — steak, salade, a carafe of Côtes du Rhône — is exactly what the morning calls for.

Take the metro east to Père Lachaise, the most famous cemetery in the world and one of the most genuinely moving places in Paris. Napoleon opened it in 1804 and it remained unfashionable until the city moved the remains of Molière and La Fontaine here as a marketing device — after which the wealthy scrambled for plots. The tombs range from plain headstones to extraordinary mausoleums. Chopin, Proust, Édith Piaf, Oscar Wilde — they are all here, separated by gravel paths that go quiet between the visits. Allow two hours and resist the urge to hurry.

Make your way back west into the Marais for the early evening. The neighbourhood's 17th-century hôtels particuliers, cobbled courtyards and narrow streets have a particular quality in the failing October light — no specific agenda, just walking and looking.

Robert et Louise on Rue Vieille du Temple is exactly what you want at the end of a day in the cemetery: a small, wood-beamed room, a fireplace, and meat roasted over an open flame. This is an old-fashioned Parisian bistrot with no irony attached — the kind of place that has fed the neighbourhood for generations and intends to keep doing so.

Finish the weekend at Le Perchoir Marais, where the rooftop looks out over the Parisian skyline at night — a city that carries its centuries lightly, all illuminated stone and dark sky. After two days moving through its underworld, seeing it from above is the right note to end on.