Underground & cool · Drag cabaret · €€ · 18e · Montmartre & Pigalle
Madame Arthur
A drag cabaret operating under this name since 1946, now a weekly French-chanson revue in a small Pigalle room: four performers in opulent costume reworking the standards, the theme rewritten each week.
Booking through this link may earn par.is a commission. Same price as anywhere.
Shows skew late and sell out; book ahead. The room is small, which is the appeal — you are within arm's reach of the act.
Getting there
- Pigalle212140 m · 3 min walk
- Abbesses12250 m · 5 min walk
- Anvers2370 m · 7 min walk
Walks that pass nearby
- Montmartre Heightsstop 2 of 6 · 200 m
Place des Abbesses
One of only two surviving Hector Guimard métro entrances with the original glass canopy. The cast-iron Art Nouveau lettering is the most photographed métro sign in the city.
The Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre church on the same square (1904) is the first reinforced-concrete church in the world — easy to miss because the brick facade looks conventional. Coffee at Le Sancerre on the corner is a Montmartre standby.
- Belle Époque Parisstop 6 of 6 · 220 m
Métro Abbesses entrance
Hector Guimard's 1900 cast-iron entrance. One of only two édicules with the original glass canopy still in place — the rest of his entrances had their roofs removed for being "too modern." The deepest station in the métro at 36 m.
Tap your ticket and ride the spiral staircase down rather than the lift — the walls are painted with murals on the way. Coming back up, take the lift; that's 174 steps the hard way. The other surviving original Guimard édicule is at Porte Dauphine.
- Cinemas That Survivedstop 3 of 6 · 360 m
Studio 28
10 Rue Tholozé, opened 1928 — the first ciné d'art-et-d'essai ("art-and-experiment cinema") in the world. Buñuel and Cocteau both consulted on the décor; the bar has Cocteau-designed light fittings and chairs. Premiered Buñuel and Dalí's L'Âge d'Or in 1930 to a riot.
The bar (open before films) is the secret — Cocteau's painted murals and original 1928 lamp shades. Have a drink in the courtyard garden behind, then sit in the velvet-seated single auditorium. Programming leans art-house and repertory; sometimes the film is in original-version English with French subtitles.
- Painters' Viewsstop 5 of 7 · 430 m
Van Gogh at Père Tanguy
14 Rue Clauzel. Julien Tanguy ran a colour-supplies shop here in the 1880s and gave struggling painters credit on materials in exchange for paintings. Van Gogh painted three portraits of Tanguy, two of them in front of a wall covered in Japanese prints. The shop is gone but the building survives.
There's a small plaque on the building. The street is quiet and residential — visit, look up at the second-floor windows, then walk on. Don't expect a museum; this is a five-minute pilgrimage stop.
Within a few minutes' walk
- Hôtel RochechouartRooftop-view boutique hotel€€ · 2 minA restored Art-Deco building in Pigalle with an open-air rooftop framing Sacré-Cœur and the Eiffel Tower — real style and a real view at mid prices.
- Bouillon PigalleBouillon€ · 3 minThe modern bouillon below Montmartre: oeuf mayo, bœuf bourguignon, île flottante, in big portions at small prices.
- Le Relais GasconSouthwest French / salads€ · 3 minThe Abbesses address that made its name on one thing: the giant salad, an outsized bowl finished with a layer of garlic-fried potatoes. The rare Montmartre plate that fills you for twelve euros.
- Le PigalleBoutique hotel€€ · 4 minA neighbourhood-soul hotel in South-Pigalle with no real front desk — the ground floor runs café, bar, vinyl and newsstand together, and rooms feel like a stylish local's flat.
- Le PantrucheNeo-bistro€€ · 4 minFranck Baranger's small SoPi room that helped write the modern bistronomy playbook in 2011 and still earns a Michelin Bib. The Grand Marnier soufflé is the dessert everyone tells you to keep room for.
- Grand Pigalle ExperimentalBoutique hotel€€ · 5 minThe Experimental Group's 2015 SoPi corner house — Dorothée Meilichzon's first hotel and still among her best — thirty-seven rooms over a cocktail bar that takes its drinks seriously. The ground floor is now Frenchie Pigalle.
The district · 18e
Montmartre & Pigalle — The butteSacré-Cœur and the artists' square up top; the back-streets of Abbesses and Lamarck below; Pigalle's neon and the Saint-Ouen flea market at the edge. Steep, photogenic, and busiest where the tour groups cluster.
Best for: View-chasers and night-owls who'll climb for it; pick the quieter north side.
Everything we've verified in the 18e →How we verified this
Confirmed currently operating as of June 2026,cross-checked against 1 source:
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- Musée de la Vie RomantiqueFree Romantic-era house-museum · 9e · 500 m€
- Studio 28Historic cinema with garden bar · 18e · 500 m€
- Musée de Montmartre — Jardins RenoirLocal museum & artist studio · 18e · 570 m€€
- Musée Gustave MoreauArtist house-museum · 9e · 640 m€
par.is is a living map of Paris. Every place here is a real, currently operating destination — re-checked over time and removed the moment we can no longer confirm it's open. No paid placements, no scraped directory: just opinionated picks worth your trip.