Underground & cool · Small museums · 16 picks · 10 districts

Small and unusual museums in Paris

Not the Louvre: artists' house-museums, sculptors' studios, the sewers, automata, a fairground. Many are free, and every pick is re-checked for continued operation.

Last re-checked 20 Sep 2026 · all underground & cool → · full ledger →

3e · Haut Marais (3)District guide →

• Musée Carnavalet — Histoire de Paris€ · Free history museumThe city's oldest museum, reopened in 2021, runs the whole arc of Paris across two Marais mansions. The pulls are specific: Proust's cork-lined bedroom, the model guillotine, Fouquet's Art Nouveau jewellery boutique transplanted intact, and a wall of old painted shop signs.✓ Verified open · 19 Sep 2026Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed MonAmong the oldest
• Musée Cognacq-Jay€ · Free 18th-century house-museumThe fortune came from La Samaritaine; the taste ran entirely to the eighteenth century. Watteau, Boucher, a small Rembrandt, Fragonard pastels and Sèvres hang in the panelled rooms of the Hôtel Donon.✓ Verified open · 19 Sep 2026Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed Mon
• Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature€€ · Unusual museumA Marais mansion where taxidermy, antique weaponry and contemporary art share period rooms — including a ceiling lined with owl feathers. One of the city's strangest, best small museums.✓ Verified open · 19 Sep 2026Tue–Sun 11:00–18:00 (Wed late Sep–Jun); closed Mon

4e · Le Marais & Île Saint-Louis (1)District guide →

• Musée de la Magie et des Automates€€ · Magic & automata museumIn sixteenth-century vaulted cellars under the Marais, a thousand years of deception laid out as hardware: more than 100 automata, distorting mirrors, trick boxes and Robert-Houdin ephemera. Admission folds in a short live conjuring turn.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Wed, Sat, Sun 14:00–19:00 (daily in school holidays)

6e · Saint-Germain-des-Prés (2)District guide →

• Musée national Eugène-Delacroix€ · Artist house-museumDelacroix took this apartment and built the garden studio behind it in 1857 to be near the Saint-Sulpice murals he was finishing, and died here in 1863. The real draw is the green courtyard and the purpose-built atelier off it.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Mon, Wed–Sun, hours vary; closed TueLong-running
• Musée Zadkine€ · Free sculptor's studio-museumOssip Zadkine carved in this low cottage off rue d'Assas from 1928 to 1967, and his Cubist figures now stand among the plane trees of its small garden as if they grew there. One of only a handful of intact artists' studios left in the city.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed MonLong-running

7e · Eiffel Tower & Invalides (1)District guide →

• Musée des Égouts de Paris€ · The sewers museumA museum inside the working sewer itself: a dry gallery on Belgrand's nineteenth-century network, then a wet gallery down in the live tunnels under the quai, smell included. Hugo set part of Les Misérables in these galleries.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00; closed Mon

8e · Champs-Élysées & Madeleine (2)District guide →

• Musée Cernuschi€ · Free Asian-art museumHenri Cernuschi brought back archaic Chinese bronzes and, from Japan, the two-metre eighteenth-century bronze Buddha of Meguro that now anchors the stairwell. The permanent rooms — Neolithic jades, Han figures, Tang ceramics — are free, and the mansion sits against Parc Monceau.✓ Verified open · 19 Sep 2026Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed Mon
• Musée Jacquemart-Andr退 · House-museum (Italian & French art)Édouard André and the painter Nélie Jacquemart spent a banking fortune on a Belle Époque mansion and an 'Italian museum' within it — Tiepolo, Uccello, Mantegna, Botticelli — reopened March 2026. The set piece is the double-helix marble staircase under a Tiepolo ceiling.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Mon–Thu 10:00–18:00; Fri to 22:00; Sat–Sun to 19:00

9e · South Pigalle & Opéra (3)District guide →

• Musée de la Vie Romantique€ · Free Romantic-era house-museumAt the foot of a private alley in old Nouvelle Athènes, the painter Ary Scheffer's 1830 house — reopened February 2026 — keeps the parlour where Chopin, Liszt and George Sand passed Friday evenings, plus the plaster cast of Sand's arm and Chopin's hand.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed MonLong-running
• Musée Gustave Moreau€ · Artist house-museumMoreau converted his own townhouse into a museum before he died in 1898, stacking the upper floors into two great glass-walled studios crammed with thousands of Symbolist works, joined by a coiling wrought-iron spiral staircase that is the most photographed object in the building.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Mon, Wed–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed TueLong-running
• Musée du Parfum Fragonard€ · Free perfume museumA step from the Opéra Garnier, the Grasse house Fragonard fitted out a Napoléon III apartment as a perfume museum: copper stills, a wall of antique scent bottles, and a 'perfume organ' of labelled raw-material vials a nose would blend from.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Mon–Sat 09:00–17:30; Sun to 16:30

12e · Bastille, Bercy & Aligre (1)District guide →

• Musée des Arts Forains€€€ · Fairground museumA private collection of 19th-century fairground rides and carousels in the Bercy pavilions — many you actually ride on the guided tour. Reservation-only, so it stays uncrowded.✓ Verified open · 19 Sep 2026By reservation (guided tours ~1h30)

15e · Vaugirard & Beaugrenelle (1)District guide →

• Musée Bourdelle€ · Free sculptor's studio-museumAntoine Bourdelle — Rodin's assistant, teacher to Giacometti — lived, taught and cast bronze on this Montparnasse plot until 1929, and the studios, apartment and two sculpture gardens survive almost untouched. The plaster hall lines up his monumental casts, 'Herakles the Archer' among them.✓ Verified open · 19 Sep 2026Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed MonLong-running

16e · Trocadéro & Passy (1)District guide →

• Musée de la Contrefaçon€ · Counterfeiting museumRun by the manufacturers' anti-fraud union, this mansion holds 500-odd seized fakes set beside the genuine article: counterfeit amphorae, forged banknotes, fake Rodin bronzes, knock-off bags, dud brake pads and counterfeit medicine. The pleasure is the side-by-side.✓ Verified open · 19 Sep 2026Mon–Fri 14:00–17:30; closed weekends & August

18e · Montmartre & Pigalle (1)District guide →

• Musée de Montmartre — Jardins Renoir€€ · Local museum & artist studioThe oldest house on the Butte, where Renoir painted the 'Bal du Moulin de la Galette' in the garden and where Valadon and Utrillo later kept a studio-apartment, now restored. The terraced Renoir gardens look straight down onto the Clos Montmartre vineyard.✓ Verified open · 20 Sep 2026Daily 10:00–19:00; summer Wed to 22:00Among the oldest