Usually the trains are for Melun or Malesherbes and leave from platform 44. When there was once a track problem I have seen them go off 42.

If you’re doing this journey regularly, or travelling around Paris sometime soon, you can buy a carnet, a book of 10 tickets, from the ticket window or machines. You can also use these on the Metro.

Each journey in zone one (which this journey is) requires one ticket – hang on to it when you’ve entered the station as ticket checks are quite common. Alternatively you can just get a single ticket.

It is two stops to Gare de Lyon. On the platform there, head up one lot of escalators following signs for “grandes lignes” out through ticket gate, then up another lot of escalators.

There’s only one tricky thing here – there are blue platforms (designated with letters) and yellow (designated with numbers). Before there is a platform known for trains there will be a blue or yellow square on the indicator board. It is important to note this, since it is at least a five-minute walk between the two sets of platforms – easy to get caught some distance from where you want to be. (When boarding the train at Gare de Lyon, do be aware that you are supposed to stamp your ticket at the platform entrance first.)

Doing the journey in reverse, at Gare de Lyon you can descend from the platform on which you train arrives (although you might want to use the escalators in the main part of the station if avoiding stairs).

Keep descending two levels until you get to RER where you can use ticket from your carnet to get to gates. Against you are taking the green line; destinations might be Orry-la-Ville or Creil – just check as the stations roll across. (Paris Nord is Gare du Nord.)

At Gare du Nord you’ll be going up two sets of escalators. Follow the signs for “grande lignes” and Eurostar to get to the main part of the station.

As anywhere in a big city, you want to watch your wallet on this route.

(Written at the request of a friend, but hopefully useful for all.)

Perhaps that’s because, for all of its messages of tolerance and acceptance of difference, it presents what are likely to be, for many, unpalatable truths. The visitor climbs the stairs of the uncomfortably fascist-feeling building (it was built for the International Colonial Exposition of 1931 and the huge facade frieze shows colonial labourers toiling for the empire’s glory) to start their tour beneath a series of maps.

These are facts, presented raw and enlighteningly, movement of people over the past century or so presented as broad sweeping arrows whose width corresponds to the numbers of people on the move.

There’s a powerful reminder that for at least the first half of the 20th century, and certainly at its start, the flows were almost all outward from Europe. It was a continent, it seemed, with huddled masses without hope at home.

And today, when there’s so much concern and discussion about immigration from the Third World to the First, again the arrows tell another story; it is the Third World that is taking the bulk of the strain of desperate human searches for security and safety.

There’s a big flow out of Eritrea into Sudan, but equally large flows from Sudan to Chad and Uganda. Chad is also getting a flow of 100,000 from the Central African Republic, but Chad also saw 20,000 refugees flee into Sudan.

At the end of 20th century the biggest by follow by far is of Mexicans into US – 10.3 million. But Europe also sent 7.5 million people to the US, a flow pretty well matched by thickness of the arrow from India to the Gulf States. These are movements that don’t always get the attention that their size might deserve.

But the main focus here of course, once you get past the maps, is France. Unlike other European countries, it has been mainly a country affected by immigration, not emigration, over the past two centuries. Immigration to France’s still wide open, empty spaces, was unrestricted up until WWI.

Even after that, many of Europe’s displaced from east, south and north arrived, at least on their way to somewhere else. Refugees from the Spanish Civil War are photographed on the French border, peering out of train windows, bored but worried. Wrapped in surely aid-supplied blankets they trudge along a crowded road. There is a disarmed republican brigade in a temporary camp, men between worlds. These might be photos from any of today’s “failed states” or political crises. The kinship is unmistakable.

And no state, it seems, is ever really able to cater adequately for the flood of political disaster. Refugees are everywhere in precarious living conditions, from the Armenians at Camp Oddo at Marseilles, built for 1,200 and finally holding 30,000 in 1923, to Sangatte (which the British tabloids so loved to hate between its opening in 1999 to closure in 2002), that was a temporary, unlovely home to 60,000 over that period.

For some, movement becomes an almost permanent state. The exhibition cites Chileans who as young children were taken by their parents into France as exiles. Then returned to Chile when democracy was restored there – there numbers so great that they got a whole name of their own, retornados.

The focus is very much on individual experience – maps, papers, stuffed toys, the small pieces left of lives torn apart. There’s also a predictable focus on “look what refugees have done” – citing a slightly scatter shot range in, for example, “culture” – Frederic Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Sonia Delaunay, Man Ray, Walter Benjamin, Eugene Ionesco.

Now showing, (until January 7) is a special exhibition of photos from America’s Ellis Island reception centre between 1905 and 1920, when it was the Europeans seeking refuge, although some starting out from better positions than others. Two tatooed German stowaways, “deported May 1911,” look like the types you would think about deporting – hard men who’ve had hard lives.

By contrast there’s Dingenis Glerum from The Netherlands with wife and 11 children in 1907. Cited by The New York Times as the “right sort” of immigrants, the journalist is “pleased to say he was shown wallet with several hundred pounds in it”.

Not much has changed then; I think of Australia’s current immigration law, which allows, almost forces, many to buy their way in – if they can.

First up, and centrally from the medieval viewpoint, are the city’s walls. Not wanting to leave Paris unprotected when he went crusading, Philippe Auguste in 1190 started build walls on right bank and from 1200 started on the left. They enclosed together 253 hectares with space for the inhabitants, and, of course, the vineyards essential to human survival. (London was much smaller, not having the same idea of “essentials”.)

And these were serious defensive measures – every 70m reinforced with a rampart that stood 9m high and 3m in diameter. Yet a scant two centuries later in the reign of Charles V the fortifications were lost except for a few fragments.

The biggest of these is outside the Lycee Charlemagne. You’ll find it at the corner of the Rue des jardins saint-paul and the Rue de l’ave. (Beside is the Village Saint Paul, a fun collection of arts workshops and antique bric a brac shops arranged around a central courtyard.)

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If you are looking for more really old paris head a bit further west, to the Rue francois macon, where two rare medieval wood-framed houses survive. These date to the 16th century in main structure but have remnants of 14th-century cores.

These were restructured after a 1508 royal decree which directed that upper floors not be galleried out over the street, because of the risk of them causing road accidents. In 1607 there was a directive to cover over wood to reduce fire risk (an example London would not follow until it was too late). These homes were restored to the original, bare-wood form in the 20th century.

Just down the road at the Rue du grenier sur l’eau is an example where the cantilevering survives, and the uneven form suggests a more original structure. Half close your eyes, squint a bit, and you might be back in the glory days when carts rumbled past this spot on the way to building two of the human race’s glories, the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre Dame.

This comes, I’d suggest, from its primary art form – the one from which the others drew their inspiration and idiom, which was small-scale paintings on paper. There’s nothing purer than a simple brush stroke – it leaves an artist nowhere to hide sloppy technique or inadequate composition.

The exhibition begins with the stunning “Banquet of Letters in the Garden”, an early 17th-century tile mosaic in rich greens, blues and yellows. Two poets write as two attendants wait. It is a picture of courtly, civilised life in a garden in which each leaf has its place.

For behind the centrality of manuscript painting was artists who were trying to depict characters with features matching those of the ideal beauty that was sung in poetry. The sky is painted in gold, turquoise or lapis blue and the grass emerald green. Patterns on bronze vessels and painted on pottery translate literary images that are symbols of the “celestial vault” that is the universe.

But that doesn’t prevent genuine, close exploration of the real world. One of the highlights, right at the start of the exhibition, is a joyous 15th-century blue and white ware vessel shaped in the form of a fowl. This is a bird that has just glorious ruffled up its feathers and with a full crop is about to settle down for a nice sun bath. There’s something right about that, since the text explains that this tradition of such wine vessels dates back to the start of the first millennium, when the Zorostrian practice of blood sacrifice was replaced by libations of wine, which would have flowed from this bird’s beak.

But generally with the ceramics it is the colours that impress – a green lotus plate from Azerbaijan from early in the 16th century is not so much vivid green as impossible green. The blues and greens in particular have an intensity that I doubt we could match today, for all of our technology.

The scale is almost always small, intimate, for a court clique of intimates, and that hugely privileged life is reflected in many of the themes. In one small but hugely detailed book painting of a court banquet from Tabriz in about 1530, the occasion is made into a picnic, and no effort is being spared to create the perfect environment. Musicians play, great torches of incense are lit and a servant climbs high into an autumn tree to suspend a song bird’s cage.

With the stories told so vividly by the pictures the text almost seems superfluous. In a page from Shah-Name of shah Tahmas of Tabriz from about 1530. A sleeping knight, still in full armour, perhaps exhausted after a battle, is protected by his loyal steed, which savages a lion that menaces him.

Late in 16th century there was a change in style that manages to make the paintings curiously both more Chinese and more Occidental. Often get a single figure, much larger than before, drawn with more sense of individual portraiture. A rather fine example of this is in the “Banquet of the Solitary Ascetic”, signed by Torabi from Herat. The ascetic takes up a good quarter of the page and half the painted space, something not seen in the earlier works, but is in his conception, if not execution, distinctly reminiscent of Chinese Ming paintings.

If you’ve read Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red you’ll be taken into this period, as Western influences get stronger (in his case in Istanbul), but the trend it seems was continued throughout the Islamic world. Works are increasingly single paintings and independent leaves rather than books, and there are clearer western influences.

The curators here complain that the art is “increasingly decadent” with “mealy mouthed sentimentality”. It is hard to argue with that conclusion, although sometimes the melange of styles does work out.

There is something delightful yet not at all twee about, for example, “The Goldfinch and the Narcissus” (Le chardonneret et le narcisse), signed Shafi Abbasi, August 1653. The influence of ornithological Western works is clear, yet something of an earlier tradition of flowers and birds has given it a warm truth. And even in these late times the colours of the ceramics are just as vivid – clearly the technology had not been lost.

Leonardo De Vinci’s is a fine piece of workmanship, and its artistic framework is closer to that of our own time and traditional ideas of “beautiful art” (as attested by 1,000s of placemats and cheap prints it has spawned all around the world). But see it once, contemplate the really-not-so-mysterious smile, and you feel that you’ve looked at an icon, not a work of art that will repay multiple visits and further study, unless you’re very into arcane details of Renaissance symbolism.The 19th-century Symbolists might have found in this image of Lisa del Giocondo their ideal of “perfect womanhood”, but it is a rather empty, shallow ideal – fitting perhaps that in common parlance she has lost her own name and become a mere symbol.

“The Lady and the Unicorn”, but contrast, is in its medieval sensibilities, far more foreign to our eye, far less immediately accesible, but visit it, and visit again, and you’ll find depths, feelings for everyone and every time. On my latest visit, in the great dark vault at the Cluny Museum (Musée du Moyen-Age) it was the, of the six tapestries depicting different senses, “Touch” that spoke to me most – I saw in it a woman facing a great and difficult choice, a challenge, a Joan of Arc who foresees a tragic end to the path she’s taking but has decided to follow that destiny anyway.

Yet my diary from a visit two decades ago tells me that then I was held rapt by “Sight”, where the lady holds a mirror up in which the unicorn admires his own super-cute reflection, but she looks on sadly, reflectively. She was musing, I felt sure on the the fragility and shortness of beauty, of life itself. Of course in both of those cases my feelings reflected events in my own life, but there was contained within the tapestries – these works of some great unknown Flemish workshop of the late 15th century.

But it seems from the crowds in the museum that everyone gets something from the tapestries – even the children, enraptured by the delightfully rendered domestic animals that are packed into the fields of flowers.

That we know so little about the tapestries has of course bred a whole academic industry to rival Mona’s – indeed there are many more mysteries here. Most academic opinion has settled on the commissioning family as the Le Listes, a bourgeois family from Lyon that moved in Bourbon court circles. Quite a bit is known about the men of the family but, typically for the period, almost nothing of the women. But it seems anyway that this is not one particular woman, but an allegory of femaleness and myth. But in the details lie the controversy.

If you haven’t read it before seeing the tapestires, I’d recommend holding off reading Tracey Chevalier’s fine historical romance, titled simply The Lady and the Unicorn. It is a fine work of popular history, but while the research is solid this is a fiction – not the real story of the tapestries. But it is a reminder that while the artist who draw these images was certainly male, and the primary weavers probably were too, there are within these threads much women’s labour, much women’s struggle, and somehow that seems to speak through the wool.

So there is, at the heart of these tapestries an emptiness, but it is an emptiness of possibility, of multiple meanings and complexity, that the small mysteries of the Mona Lisa can’t hope to match.

At the heart, physical and conceptual, of this exhibition is “Articulated-disarticulated”, from 2001-2002. These are not, mostly, bodies but the struggling almost dead. A disarticulated acrobat winds floppily around his bar, a rabbit hopelessly kicks its feet, a body that is just torso and arm tries feebly to raise itself.

Around the walls are strange makeshift totem poles, symbols perhaps of the god to whom this slaughter is dedicated. Outside you can hear the carrion birds squabbling, waiting for the waste. What is contolling this, the wires, the pulleys, the counterweight, are all clearly visible – the hands of fate, which somehow only makes it more spooky.

Even before the exhibition, visitors get a powerful taste of Messager, with “La ballade de pinochio a beaubourg 2007″, in the foyer. Over-stuffed plastic body parts in cargo handlers nets descend at unpredictable intervals. They are obscenely over-full, rotten perhaps. Underneath is a great tumbled pile of simple ticking pillows in which are buried their fallen comrades. On a thin track through them one wooden stick figure, strapped into a position of sleep, with a very long nose, circles endlessly.

Entering the exhibition proper, you are in what can only be a fantastic abbatoir: human forms, what might be the hybrid of a shark and a 747, skeletal hands, even a kangaroo, swing jerkily from the ever rotating track, awaiting the attentions of the butcherer. And yet its sound is gentle, almost soothing, hypnotic.

The exhibition then starts with early work – with some of the gaucheness that term might suggest. You can see the future themes in “The boarders” (1971-72): stuffed sparrows and finches, or bundles of feathers, on clockwork machines, fitted into knitted by clothes, and lying on hard beds.

The feminist themes that flood through her work, and something (Anglo visitors will think) of Tracey Emin in “The secret room of the collector”, which brings together early 70s pieces from “My Jealousies” to “The Men I love the men I do not love”, and “Collection to find my best signature”. This is a complete work of self-fashioning laid bare.

Don’t forget to look up in the first corridor, for above you is “Them and us, us and them”, a spooky bestiary of hybrid toy and taxidermied animals sitting on mirrors that reflect the audience below.

The strongly feminist strand in her work returns at this exhibition’s end, with a display of needlework that is the antithesis of those worked by Victorian girls being constructed as good bourgeois women – for these are simple yet utterly subversive in their obvious nonsense: “Women are instructed by nature, men by books. A woman without husband is a ship without rudder.” These are linked: “I think therefore I suck.”

We’ll surely soon see Messager at the Tate Turbine Hall – the London collection apparently only now has one of her works, but she has the intellectual depth and physical scale, with added sheer entertainment value, to possess that intimidating space.

But these are items of wealth, of an established community – Jewish communities are visible in the historical record in Alsace and Thuringe from the 12th century, where they were already known for their commercial activities, at the core of urban economies.

There is a small but spectacular collection of wedding rings, amaxingly intricate masterpieces of the jeweller’s art in the shape of domed building suggestive of the Temple of Jerusalem, and previous metal, or metal-decorated fine belts, a traditional love gift. Judging by a couple of handy statues of the Virgin of the period they were worn high; just under the breasts.

Perhaps surprising – this is not what you think of from towns of this period – there are many signs of the love culture more commonly associated with noble courts: items are decorated with the bows of Cupid. miniature keys to love, and many scenes featuring abbreviations of the Germanic word for love (lieb, lib, liep, lip).

The power of the trading ties is evident in other jewellry here; there is no shortage of precious stones — sapphires, rubies and pearls are often in evidence. Many of the rings are very simple presentations of these – showing a real sense of taste.

An idea of where all the funding for this came lies in the collection of simple silver ingots from both of these centres – there was money in making, well the money, the coins of the day, and in other gold and silver-smithing, and trading. But, in the days before any real sense of the rule of law, there was also danger. You can’t but think of what happened to many of the owners of these precious items, since the fact they survive today is only due to their being unable to return to collect them.

So favourites are more a matter of mood than food, more emotion than calculation. I’ve long been a fan of the Café Panis looking out on Notre Dame, but it has slightly spoilt its copybook by having a Subway chain store built beside it, and a recent repaint that’s left it with a faint scent of faux.

So I’ve settled on a new official favourite, Le Nemours on Place Colette. It is tucked under a grand classical arcade beside the Comédie Française.

The menu is pretty standard fare: various croques, sandwiches and salads, although the names for these are given a local touch. La Molière is what is called elsewhere country salad; La Comedienne is prety much Nicoise.

Inside the long narrow room is decorated with paintings of grand era of 19th-century theatre. And miracle or miracles this is nonfumeur (non-smoking) – a rare such space to be treasured, although often very full.

But if the weather is fine pick your seat carefully outside – Americans can be annoying to listen to but they are rarely smokers so you won’t get caught in the slipstream.

Look out on the wonderfully mad Metro entrance, quite possibly at the queue for the cheap late tickets for the Comédie, should you be here late afternoon, and at the lovely highbrow bookshops across the square.

That kiosk is grandly titled “Le Kiosque des Noctambules”. To find an explanation you’ll have to descend the stairs to the Metro entrance, where a plaque explains that it was designed and put in place in 2000 by Jean-Michael Othoniel to celebrate centenary of metro. The official description says it has a two faces, the luminous and obscure, the former coing from the sky coming through the metal circles, the latter from the colour ceramic that fills some of them. Personally I just call it fun.

You are, lunch digested, only metres from the Louvre, a short stroll from Tullieres, or if you fancy some window shopping, or even real shopping if your pocketbook is bulging, the stores in the area are currently, so the writers on such matters say, the height of fashion.

After a while, in this parade of swords and sabres, lances and daggers, I could not but wonder how many lives the weapons in the exhibition had taken, imagined each of the weapons dripping with blood in proportion. For there’s few pieces here still, even those many centuries old, for which you could not be arrested for carrying an offensive weapon were you to step outside with them.

Many of the older weapons here might well have been directed against the Crusaders, yet the first thing I learnt from this exhibition was that the two sides in this centuries-long, if spasmodic struggle for what both called the Holy Land were curiously alike – for the Islamic world had a tradition of knighthood astonishingly like that of the West – the knight had a solemn code of behaviour and code only be granted that status by a king or noble in a solemn investiture ceremony at which he would receive his sword.

Many of the tales of knightly derring-do seem also to have had much in common – a fine small painting from Qazwin in 16th-century Iran shows a mounted knight doing combat against a fire-breathing dragon. It might be an English St George, except that the dragon has a distinctly Chinese cast’ it was not so long ago, after all, that the Mongol hordes had been through, burning all before them.

There was also that feeling of belonging to a band of brothers so idealised in knightly tales: another painting from Shiraz a century or so earlier shows the end of a bout of single combat deciding a battle before two armies, from the Book of Kings of Firdawsi. The victor cradles his dying opponent with love and care, as the two armies – drawn in great, fine detail by the artist – look on.

Yet when you look at this exhibition, at its silent, clean but evocative edges, it is clear that the primary atmosphere in which they existed must have been one of fear. Everywhere around Paris now you’ll see the single image being used to advertise this exhibition, a spectacular, spooky gilt full face mask. It is dated to the 16th century, although it is unclear whether its origins are Iran, or the Tatars of the Crimea. The exhibition text notes that such masks were worn in battle for centuries, but the tradition died out soon after this was made. That’s surprising in a way, for it must have been terrifying to see that thundering down at you on a galloping horse.

So there are more than weapons in this exhibition – but it is undoubtedly they which dominate it. Another highlight is a yatagan from the royal workshop in Istanbul in the early 1500s with a handle of ivory and gold inlay on the blade showing yet another dragon being slain. Its spectacular scabard in silver and purple velvet has also survived in near-perfect condition, recording its ownership by Ahmed ibn Hersek Khan, many times grand vizier and a man instrumental, the exhibition says, in winning a vital battle against the Mamluks in 1517.

Against such blades a warrior no doubt needed all of the defence he could get, so there are also many fine (and still solid-looking) helmets here, plus several spectacularly preserved full suits of chain mail, their intricate detail a reminder of why only the wealthiest could afford such protection. One complete 14th-century gilt set here bears the name of Ibrahim Sultan ibn Shahrukh ibn Timur, who was governor of Shiraz from 1414 to 1434.

But worn underneath that would have been more mystical protection. There’s just one example here – what must have been a rare survival – a cotton vest – in simple bib form tied at the neck and sides, packed with tiny, carefully written and arranged Islamic verses. And perhaps if you couldn’t afford the armour you’d have to make do with such protection, and your prayers.

That begins in the first room, as the Middle Ages are turning into the early modern. There’s a lovely 14th-century stone Virgin, holding a serious-looking manuscript. This is a serious, considered, intelligent Virgin, not the vacuous innocent as she’s so often portrayed.

That still feels very medieval, but the lives of women and men were becoming increasingly sophisticated. An armoire dated to 1510 (the time of Louis XII) has linenfold side panels that evoke the Late Gothic but foliate panels and arabesques (showing Italian influence after military campaigns there) on the front and 16 images of men and women in extravagent hats and dress reflect new taste for luxury. This spectacular piece also marks the evolution from the medieva chest, which had been the most important furniture item, used for storage, as a table, a seat and even a bed, to the double-layer armoir, which held much more.

But some things took a while to change – a bed from the end of the 15th century is, to our eyes, very short, and piled high with pillows. That was since people slept sitting up, since lying down was identified with death – as in the depiction of tomb figures. (So when we say of those “they look like they are sleeping”, that’s not what would have been thought back then.)

If that sounds like an uncomfortable night’s sleep, you could at least wake up to the sun streaming through beautiful stained glass. As with this lovely 1543 example from the workshop of Dirck Crabeth of Leyden, it was not just used in churches, but in universities, hospitals, chateau, houses and even inns. This example has religious motifs but glass was also produced with very secular themes, often playing on aspects of the owners’ coat of arms.

Not to say there are not plenty of hideous things here – in a room with some lovely, considered if austere chairs from the School of Fountainebleu, which was hudely influential in establishing fine Renaissance styles, are a set of six elaboratedly shaped and carved chairs. Their backs are formed by naked women; from Venice in the 16th century they fit the “hideous” bill perfectly. Tastelessness is not a modern phenomenon.

But in a lovely room full of small portraits – even royalty originally only got this size, since portraits were displayed only in cabinets of curiosity, not as room decoration – it is back to the real women, specifically with a focus on Marie de Hongrie, Queen and Regent of Netherlands, known as la protectrice des arts. This is no masterpiece, said to be a copy of a lost Titien, but it is said that she had a lot of influence in bringing the expression of the Italian Renaissance to the Netherlands at the start of the 16th century.

And the world just keeps getting more complicated. In the late 17th century there is a sudden appearance of new forms of furniture – desks, chests of drawers, small tables. Older ideas, however, cling on in odd ways: the French word “bureau” comes from word bure, the term for a cheap form of wool that was used to cover writing desks and protect from ink stains.

And once things starting getting fancy, with the Rococo, they go really over the top. On display is “probably the largest chest of drawers in existence”, a 3m-long monster created for Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Princesse de Conti, the illegitimate daughter of Louis V. A single piece of swirling red marble tops two sets of wavy drawers with end cabinets atop gold lions’ feet and with sunburst gold handles. You really would lose your “smalls” in the back of these drawers.

The style, emerging at the start of the 18th century, is perfectly illustrated by the decorated ceiling (below) from L’hotel de Verrue (c 1720). Whimsy is strong here – there are musical apes on the painted centre panel and hunter apes in the gold relief over the cornice. This was made for the fabulously wealthy salon hostess the Countess de Verrue.

Rococo took its name from fake grottos, but was modelled entirely on the shapes of marine environments. Freeflowing forms are seemingly always in movement; it is a total rebellion against straight, formal, classical forms. One small but supreme expression is in a sauceboat made by Jean-Claude Chambellan Duplesis; its handles are in the form of two waves, the sides lapping wavelets.

But there is some less studied pieces. Particularly notable among these are the light, monochrome paintings, little more than sketches, by Francois Boucher, who was the favourite artist of the king’s official mistress Madame de Pompadour. You can still almost see the artist creating the work, swishing brush over canvas.

Dining rooms were not common in households until Louis XV’s reign. (And of course they are again disappearing.) Before then people ate in bedchambers or antechambers. But dining became very grand indeed, with each course having lots of dishes laid out according to plan prearranged by maitre d’hotel. This is marked by a spectacular collection of porcelain of a sort below, suggesting there was a meal on the table even when there wasn’t.

We’re moving now into a sophisticated age, and that’s clear from the spectacular “Cabinet des fables” of Madame Dange (her husband was Francois-Balthazar, Farmer-General). The complete room is reconstructed here from the family mansion in the Place Vendome, together with a video explaining the restoration process. On one side of the room the delicate pink framing has been returned, but on the other the gilding, introduced by 19th-century military men who found the pink a bit much, has been retained. The Fables of the Fountain have some resemblance to Aesop’s, being far from happy children’s tales, but have a real edge – nature raw in tooth and claw – that sits a little curiously with the polite gatherings you can imagine having once occurred in this room. (The story of the restoration is told here.)

Inevitably, though there is a reaction against the “frivolous, unnatural” designs of the Roccoco, in the form of neoclassicalism. So you get this bust of Madame His by Jean Antone Houdon. As Marie-Anne Damaris Dumoustier de Vastre she married Pierre-François, an important German banker who also kept offices in Paris and Denmark. (This is 1774; globalisation, or at least European integration, seems to be in full swing.)

Excesses of Roccocco were gone, but the fashion for flowers, increasingly carefully observed from nature, remained, often combined with festoons of ribbons. The style was greatly popularised by the spread of wallpaper from the 1780, often in what was known as Etruscan style.

That light and attractive style seems, however, to have been overwhelmed by the arrival of mahogany in the late 18th under Louis XVI, as part of a craze for all things English. One of the oldest pieces here is a grand armoir from Toulouse. The tropical wood first being available in the port cities, it demonstrates that not all national fashion started in Paris.

The Revolution might have brought dramatic political change, and separated a lot of people from their heads, but in fashion terms the concern was all with ideal beauty: Neoclassicism ruled in the first two decades of the 19th century. It was austere and serene, glorying in Greek ideals of which the highest of course was democracy. The framework remained under Napoleon, but he saw himself as the patron of craftsmen and arts for economic purposes. There are echoes of Saddam Hussein in the comment that he showed off his wealth and power with a whole chain of palaces.

Things got duller when the monarchy returned, with an aged king. Again that left an opening for a woman, the Duchess de Berry, (below), who lived in and decorated this very wing of the Louvre. She was regarded as the leader of style of the restoration period, and followed much of the empire style in rich taste and Egyptian themes, but favoured lighter-coloured wood.

It was time, however, for fashions to circle again, so then comes a return to European inspiration and a new historicism, as represented by the elaborate French Renaissance-inspired bedroom of William Hope, a rich Anglo-Dutch banker, constructed 1820 in what is now the Polish embassy. You get of course, as in England, your neo-Gothic – no more attractive here than over the channel, and even sort of Neo-Rococo.

New technology also meant new possibilities, among them papiere mache furniture made from boiled cardboard and glue, poured into moulds, particularly in England and sold to the bourgeoise of Europe. All of their abundant cash went in the decoration, with mother of pearl particularly popular.

Not a great piece of design, but it’s after it that you get to my single favourite item in the exhibition – the bed specially made for the top courtesan in Paris at the end of 19th century, Valtesse de La Bigne For her grand home on the Boulevard Malesherbes. She was the model for Zola’s Nana, heroine of his most scandalous book.

No expense, or designer flourish, is spared – the patinated bronze is reminiscent of the gilt wood traditionally used for ceremonial beds (usually for royalty). The designer used the balustrade around the foot to enclose the amorous territory of the lovers that only the cupids in the headboard and leering fauns in the canopy have the right to behold. The cupids hold the courtesan’s pseudoaristocratic arms.
Zola described it as “an altar of byzantine sumptuousness” and that’s about right.

I could stop there, but the museum goes right on into the current day – indeed you’re most likely to find yourself next in the 2000s, which, it is proposed as being marked by a response to a lack of space with multifunctional, architecturally styled pieces. Well maybe.

You might think at this point that you have lost the 20th century, but when you take the stairs or the cunningly hidden lift (on the right) you get to the 1940s and work your way down the open tower. The first three decades of the century may be hidden here somewhere, but I didn’t find them. (It seems to be the current fashion in Paris museums to make navigation impossibly confusing – you might as well pick up the free map at the entrance, then you’ll be able to stare at it while still remaining puzzled.)

So the 20th century in short: the interwar period a conflict between modernism and reinterpretation of tradition; the fifties a period of austerity and lack of traditional materials meant simplicity and experimentation with materials such as wicker, leather and nontraditional European woods; eighties and nineties “the arrival of irony”. This was not a good thing for furniture, at least not if you want a chair you can sit on or a table you can eat off. You might as well go back to a good solid, multifunctional medieval chest.

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