From the Panthéon to the Obelisk: A Half-Day Walk Across Paris

Paris makes most sense on foot, and in roughly the order it grew. This walk starts on the hill of the Left Bank, where the city keeps its scholars and its honoured dead, drops through a garden and a parish church to the cafés of Saint-Germain, crosses the river at the island where Paris began, and ends among the royal squares of the Right Bank.

There are eleven stops. Some are on every postcard: a dome, a river, a formal garden, an obelisk. Others are places most visitors walk straight past: a fountain hidden under plane trees, a triangular square behind a gap between two houses, a bridge that is far older than its name. Together they tell one story, of a city that kings, revolutionaries and emperors each rebuilt to suit themselves, and that kept a little of every version.

The Panthéon crowns the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the hill of the Latin Quarter. Louis XV ordered it as a church for the patron saint of Paris, and his architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot gave it a great dome and a temple front of Corinthian columns. It was finished just as the Revolution began, and in 1791 the new government turned it into a resting place for the nation's great figures. The inscription above the columns still says so: Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante, to great men, from a grateful homeland.

Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Marie Curie lie in the crypt. Under the dome swings a pendulum in memory of the one Léon Foucault hung here in 1851 to show that the Earth turns. The building opens daily from 10:00 to 18:00, and until 18:30 from April to the end of September.

Downhill from the Panthéon lies the Luxembourg Garden, and on its eastern side, close to the palace, is the stop most people miss. Marie de' Medici, the Florentine widow of Henri IV, had the Luxembourg Palace built in the 1620s, and around 1630 she added a grotto fountain in the Italian taste she had grown up with.

The Fontaine Médicis has moved since. In the 1860s, when Haussmann's new streets cut into the garden, it was taken down and rebuilt on its present spot, and given the long, narrow basin that makes it so still. The sculpture dates from the same years: Auguste Ottin's bronze giant Polyphemus leans over the rock, about to discover the marble lovers Acis and Galatea beneath him. The palace behind it now houses the French Senate.

The first thing to notice about the Église Saint-Sulpice is that its towers do not match. The church was begun in 1646 and took more than a century to build; the north tower was rebuilt by Jean Chalgrin in the 1770s, and the south one was never finished.

Inside, two things reward a short visit. In the first chapel on the right are the murals Eugène Delacroix completed in 1861, two years before his death, among them Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. And across the floor of the transept runs a thin brass line ending at a stone obelisk: an eighteenth-century gnomon, an astronomical instrument that used a ray of sunlight to mark the turning of the year. The church is open from 08:00 to 19:45. It is a working parish, so step quietly if a service is under way.

A few streets north, the name tells you what was once here. Saint-Germain-des-Prés means Saint Germanus of the meadows: an abbey founded in the sixth century in open fields outside the city. The bell tower of its church, raised around the year 1000, is among the oldest in Paris.

The neighbourhood's second life came after the Second World War, when Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their circle wrote and argued in the cafés on the boulevard, Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore among them. The quarter still trades on that reputation, with bookshops and galleries in the narrow streets that run down from the boulevard to the Seine. Take any of them: they all lead to the river.

The Pont Neuf, the New Bridge, is the oldest bridge still standing over the Seine in Paris. It was begun in 1578 under Henri III and inaugurated in 1607 by Henri IV. What made it new was the design: it was the first bridge in the city built without houses along it, and with pavements, so that Parisians crossing it could, for the first time, look at their river.

Look over the side as you cross. Beneath the cornice runs a row of 381 carved stone faces, the mascarons, no two alike. Above each pier a half-round bay with a stone bench juts out over the water. Midway, where the bridge touches the tip of the Île de la Cité, Henri IV rides in bronze. The original statue was melted down during the Revolution; this one dates from 1818. Steps behind it lead down to the Square du Vert-Galant, the small garden at the very point of the island, named after the king's nickname.

Directly opposite the statue, a gap between two houses of brick and pale stone leads into Place Dauphine. Henri IV had it laid out in 1607 and named it for his son the dauphin, the future Louis XIII. Its shape is the shape of the island's tip: a triangle, narrowing towards the bridge.

Most of the houses have been rebuilt or raised over four centuries, but the pair at the entrance still show the brick-and-stone pattern the king intended. What matters now is the mood. The traffic of the quays is a few steps away and barely heard; there are trees, benches and café terraces along the sides. It is the best place on the walk to do nothing for a while.

The island was the seat of power long before it was a place to rest. Along its northern quay stand the round medieval towers of the Conciergerie, what survives of the palace of the kings of France. When the kings moved out in the fourteenth century, the building was left to the law courts and became a prison.

Its darkest years came with the Revolution, when the Revolutionary Tribunal sat here. Marie-Antoinette spent her last weeks in a cell in the Conciergerie in 1793 before she was taken to the guillotine. On the corner tower, the Tour de l'Horloge, look for the city's oldest public clock, first set there around 1370. The building is open daily from 09:30 to 18:00; on this walk it is a landmark to pass rather than a visit to make. From here you leave the island and walk west along the river.

Cross to the Right Bank by the Pont au Change, turn left along the quay, and the long Louvre begins to fill the view. It started as a royal palace and in 1793, during the Revolution, it opened as a museum. The glass pyramid in the main courtyard, designed by I. M. Pei, was added in 1989 and now serves as the main entrance.

You do not need to go in to get something from this stop. Walk into the courtyard and turn slowly: wings of different centuries face each other around the pyramid, and the arch at the far end opens straight onto the Tuileries. Our data gives the museum's hours as 09:00 to 18:00, until 21:00 on Wednesdays and Fridays, and closed on Tuesdays.

Leave the Louvre courtyard by the arch on its western side, and the Tuileries Garden begins at once.

Catherine de' Medici started a palace and garden here in 1564, on the site of the tile works, the tuileries, that gave them their name. A century later, in 1664, André Le Nôtre, the gardener of Versailles, redrew the garden with the central avenue, round basins and raised terraces it still has. The palace is the part that is missing: it burned in 1871 during the Paris Commune, and its ruins were cleared away in 1883. That is why the garden now opens directly onto the courtyards of the Louvre. The green metal chairs around the basins are free to use. The garden is open from 07:30 to 21:00.

Leave the garden on its north side, pass under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, and the Rue de Castiglione delivers you into Place Vendôme. The square opened in 1699 to frame a statue of Louis XIV on horseback, with matching façades by Jules Hardouin-Mansart on all eight sides. The façades came first; the plots behind them were sold off afterwards, and each buyer built a house to fit.

The king's statue was torn down in 1792. In its place Napoleon raised the column you see now, completed in 1810 to celebrate his victory at Austerlitz. It is modelled on Trajan's Column in Rome, with a bronze relief spiralling to the top, cast from captured enemy cannon. In May 1871 the Commune pulled it down as a symbol of empire; the painter Gustave Courbet was blamed and ordered to pay for it, and the column was put back up a few years later. The jewellers and the Ritz hotel came after.

The last stop is the oldest thing in Paris. The Luxor Obelisk, at the centre of Place de la Concorde, was carved for the pharaoh Ramesses II more than three thousand years ago and stood at the entrance to the temple of Luxor. Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, gave it to France, and it was raised here on 25 October 1836 in front of King Louis-Philippe and an enormous crowd. The gilded diagrams on the pedestal show the machines that lowered, shipped and lifted it. The gold-leaf cap was added in 1998.

An Egyptian monument suited this square because it took no side in French history. The guillotine stood on this ground during the Revolution; Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette both died here in 1793. From beside the obelisk the city lines up in every direction: east through the Tuileries to the Louvre, west up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, north to the columns of the Madeleine, south across the river to the National Assembly.

In half a day you have gone from a church remade as a temple of the Republic to a pharaoh's obelisk standing where a king was executed. In between came a queen's fountain that was moved to make way for a street, a bridge that let Parisians see their river, a palace turned prison, a garden that outlived its palace, and a column that was pulled down and put back.

That is the habit worth noticing on a first visit. Paris rarely erases its past; it gives the old places a new job and carries on. The famous sights are easier to read once you have seen it happen ten times in a row.