There is a scene that repeats itself every summer morning outside the Louvre: a queue that winds from the glass pyramid across the Cour Napoléon, composed of visitors who have not yet discovered that there is a way to walk past all of it and enter directly. The Paris Museum Pass is that way. A laminated card valid for two, four, or six consecutive days, it grants free and direct entry — no queuing at the ticket desk, straight to the security line — to more than sixty museums and monuments across the Paris region. For the serious museum visitor, it is one of the best investments available.
What the Pass Covers
The Paris Museum Pass — the Paris Museum Pass, as it is universally called even in French — covers an extraordinary range. The major national museums are all included: the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée de l'Orangerie (home of Monet's monumental Water Lilies), the Centre Pompidou, the Musée Rodin, the Musée Picasso, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The major royal monuments are there too: the Palace of Versailles, the Château de Fontainebleau, the Château de Chantilly. Beyond Paris proper, the pass extends to Vincennes, Saint-Denis (the basilica where every French king and queen is buried), Senlis, and others.
What is not included is also worth knowing: temporary exhibitions at covered museums often require a supplementary ticket, as do certain special displays. The Sainte-Chapelle — the thirteenth-century royal chapel on the Île de la Cité, whose stained glass is among the most beautiful objects in France — is included. The Eiffel Tower is not. The Opéra Garnier's auditorium visits are not. These are worth knowing in advance, so that you can plan accordingly and not discover them on the day.
The Louvre in French
The Louvre is the largest art museum in the world and holds works that span twelve thousand years of human civilisation, from Egyptian antiquities to nineteenth-century French painting, from Greek sculpture to Flemish masters. It receives several million visitors a year, most of whom have come specifically for the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, and who have allocated perhaps two hours for the experience. This is, to put it gently, insufficient. The Louvre rewards a different approach: slow, sectional, and repeated. With the Museum Pass, you can enter and leave freely over several days, dedicating each visit to a single wing, a single period, a single obsession.
The Louvre is better in French for a practical reason: the audio guides and the wall texts are more comprehensive in their original language, and the staff — many of whom are art historians working in their specialist area — are more forthcoming when addressed in French. The question Pardon, monsieur — vous pouvez me dire quelque chose sur ce tableau? (Excuse me — can you tell me something about this painting?) asked of a gallery attendant has started conversations in the Louvre that lasted thirty minutes and ended with a handwritten recommendation for an obscure room in a distant wing containing something that no guidebook has ever mentioned.
The Musée d'Orsay and the Language of Impressionism
Housed in a converted railway station on the Left Bank, the Musée d'Orsay holds the world's greatest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art: Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin. The building itself — its vast nave, its ornate clock faces, its light — is worth the visit regardless of what hangs in it. With what hangs in it, it is one of the most extraordinary experiences a visitor to France can have.
The Impressionist movement was, among other things, a linguistic revolution: it changed not just how painters painted but how critics described painting, and those descriptions — in French — gave us a vocabulary that persists. Impressionniste was originally a term of mockery, taken from a Monet canvas titled Impression, soleil levant. Pointillisme describes Seurat's technique of small dots of pure colour. Fauvisme (from fauves, wild beasts) was what critics called Matisse and his circle. To know this vocabulary is to see the paintings differently — to understand that these are not just beautiful objects but arguments, made in paint and defended in French.
Versailles: The Language of Power
The Palace of Versailles, thirty minutes from Paris by RER, was built by Louis XIV as a demonstration of absolute royal power so complete that it eventually became its own contradiction. The Hall of Mirrors — two hundred and forty feet of gold and glass, reflecting the gardens and the sky — was intended to dazzle. It still does, although now it dazzles in several languages simultaneously. With the Museum Pass, entry is included; the queues can be shortened further by arriving before ten in the morning or by visiting on a weekday in winter.
Versailles in French has a particular quality: the names of the rooms — the Salon de la Guerre (War Room), the Salon de la Paix (Peace Room), the Chambre du Roi (King's Bedroom) — carry the weight of the history that happened in them more vividly in French than in translation. To walk through the state apartments of Louis XIV with enough French to read the bilingual texts unaided is to encounter not just the art but the power that commissioned it — and to understand, with unusual clarity, why the French Revolution was necessary.
