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The oldest café in Paris, this was a meeting place for writers such as Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac and Zola.

F Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote were among many American writers who drank in this café-restaurant.

This was home to the literary and artistic élite of Paris as well as a regular haunt of Surrealists such as François Mauriac.

In a city of glamour and grandeur, the sewers (egouts ) of Paris are an incongruously popular attraction. They date from the Second Empire (1851–70), when Baron Haussmann was transforming the city (see The Second Empire), and the sewers which helped to sanitize and ventilate Paris are considered one of his finest achievements. Most of the work was done by an engineer named Belgrand. The 2,100-km (1,300-mile) network covers the area from Les Halles to La Villette – if laid end-to-end the sewers would stretch from Paris to Istanbul. An hour-long tour includes a walk through some of the tunnels, where you’ll see water pipes, telephone lines and various cables, while the museum tells the story of the city’s water and sewers, from their beginnings to the present day. There is an audio-visual show and a room devoted to sanitation techniques of the future.

The 1862 novel by Victor Hugo (1802–85) is an all-too-vivid portrayal of the poor and the dispossessed in early 19th-century Paris. At its centre is the tale of nobleman Jean Valjean, unfairly victimized by an unjust system. The younger character of Marius is based around Hugo’s own experiences as an impoverished student.

The Occupation of France by Germany during World War II were some of Paris’s darkest days, but the city was also the centre for the French Resistance. Allied forces liberated Paris on 25 August 1944; just two days earlier, the German commander Von Choltitz had ignored Adolf Hitler’s order to burn the city.

A replica of the Statue of Liberty’s torch in New York was erected in 1987 by the International Herald Tribune to mark their centenary and honour the freedom fighters of the French Resistance during World War II. It is located on the right bank of the Pont de l’lma, the bridge over the tunnel where Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in an automobile crash in 1997. The Liberty Flame has now become her unofficial memorial and is often draped with notes and flowers laid in her honour.

The stunningly opulent opera house was built in 1770, to be ready in time for the marriage of the dauphin , the future Louis XVI, to Marie-Antoinette. The floors were designed so that they could be raised to stage level during special festivals.

Published in 1887, Zola’s L’ssommoir (The Drunkard) shows a side of Paris that many at the time would have preferred to ignore – the alcoholism of the working classes. It is one of the author’s series of 20 linked books known as the Rougon-Macquart sequence, which depict life in every quarter of society, through the eyes of two branches of the same family.

The writer Honoré de Balzac (see Le Père Goriot) rented an apartment here from 1840–44, and assumed a false name to avoid his many creditors. He worked on several of his famous novels here, including La cousine Bette and La comédie humaine . The house is now a museum displaying first editions and manuscripts, personal mementoes and letters, and paintings and drawings of his friends and family.