Places nancybdeol Wants to Go

A Parisian exterminator's shop whose storefront displays stuffed rats hanging from traps.

This former “ante-chamber to the guillotine” has been refurbished to illustrate the brutal history of French justice.

The only remaining collection of flayed figures made by French "madman" Honoré Fragonard.

Hundreds of hidden passageways weave through the old quarters of Lyon.

Sacked by Vikings, blessed by William the Conqueror, dealt a fatal blow during the French Revolution—these ruins have seen it all.

This Parisian fountain is a little bit fantasy and a little bit nightclub.

Science fiction's grandfather has a fittingly marvelous tomb.

A favorite Paris bar for U.S. expats, including Gershwin, Hemingway, and James Bond.

The largest medical and anatomical collection in France lies hidden from the public.

Down a cobblestone alleyway is a museum dedicated to Romanticism, with a secret garden.

A unrivaled and rather horrifying collection of wax dermatological models.

The history of radiation is on safe display at the foot of a radiation science laboratory.

A majestic lion statue guards this Parisian botanical garden, and feeds on an unsettling item.

One of the greatest maze designer’s greatest mazes.

An "inside out" building in the historical center of Paris, featuring Europe’s largest modern art museum.

This museum houses an imposing skeleton army comprised of creatures great and small.

A grotto-like lodge decorated with gilded mosaics, rocks and a noisy waterfall was the setting for the most sumptuous pleasure house of 1900s Europe.

Known as the "Dodo Manège," this carousel features a herd of animals that have disappeared—or may be gone soon.

Paris' fabled purveyor of exotic taxidermy and natural history curios.

A Parisian cemetery where the elite and artistic are interred beneath an eccentric collection of tombs.

Stroll through retro Paris while shopping for old postcards and discarded doll heads.

Behind the pink curtain, Au Bonheur du Jour, an art gallery of erotic archives.

This French ghost town from World War II has been left as a memorial to German atrocities during World War II.

A scandalous Art Nouveau collaboration that set Paris all atwitter at the turn of the 20th century.