What's really behind the dark tales of Paris?
9 walks with different starting points and stories. Compare their maps, stops and duration, then choose where to begin.
Explore these walks
Paris has dark tales that have been told in many different ways. These walks gather mysteries, crimes and legends while keeping documented events distinct from circulating stories. They look for each tale's setting and context: finding out where a version came from can be as interesting as hearing it for the first time.
In “Montmartre, the Hill of the Martyrs”: The stolen heads that reached Picasso's circle place mystery alongside the painters of the Bateau-Lavoir.
In “Painters' Montmartre”: The donkey that signed a painting and the miller's legend bring hoaxes and popular tales into the painters' locations.
In “The Great Names of Père-Lachaise”: Doubts surrounding Molière's grave and the medieval lovers' tomb let you ask how the cemetery's reputation was built.
Choose from 9 independent walks in Paris. Open the one that interests you to see its map, stops and approximate duration before deciding. You don't need to do them all or follow this selection's order; each walk has its own starting and finishing points.
Open a marker to see its page. Use two fingers to move the map on mobile.
Then come the chapel of a hospital for plague victims, the rise where the great gallows of Paris stood, and a square that was an arena for animal fights before it took the name of a Resistance fighter and gained Niemeyer's dome.
On the riverbank, facing the Pont des Arts, you look across the water to where the Tour de Nesle once stood, and take its legend apart: a nameless queen in a line by Villon, and a tower added by nineteenth-century theatre.
You start in front of the Hôtel de Ville, on the old Place de Grève, where the city punished and celebrated in the same spot, where the Marquise de Brinvilliers met her end, and where a palace burned in 1871 only to rise again exactly as it was.
The stolen heads that reached Picasso's circle place mystery alongside the painters of the Bateau-Lavoir.
The donkey that signed a painting and the miller's legend bring hoaxes and popular tales into the painters' locations.
Then you look down at the ironwork on the doors and at Biscornette, the locksmith who took his secret to the grave (the pact with the Devil was added by a later legend).
Doubts surrounding Molière's grave and the medieval lovers' tomb let you ask how the cemetery's reputation was built.
It fell in August 1792, and in 1793 a murdered deputy was laid out on its empty pedestal; the city's own panels say the Marquis de Sade spoke, and you find out what he really left in writing.
The cemetery of secrets and the masked prisoner open a walk connecting mystery with places in the Marais and around the Bastille.
Paris works best a neighbourhood at a time. Combine a walk, a pause and another look: the distances on the map can be deceptive.
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