Once upon a time there was a Palace called the Palais d’Orsay, just across the river from the Louvre. Like many buildings, however, it was burned down in 1871. The site stayed empty until the Great Exhibition of 1900, when the Orleans Railway Company took it over and built a station for visitors to the exhibition. They called it Gare d’Orléans, but Parisians as usual preferred the old name, and it’s always been called Gare d’Orsay. 

In 1940 the trains stopped and the station became a prisoner-of-war camp, and then it stood empty. At one point, a theatre company took it over, performing in a huge tent inside the building, but the place was falling down and they moved out. It should have been pulled down, but President Pompidou refused permission, and it has finally re-opened as the Musée d’Orsay, a Museum of the Nineteenth Century. Actually, it covers the years from 1848 (dethronement of Louis-Philippe) to 1914. The building itself is the first exhibit; Art Nouveau style, elegant and grandiose; but its chief glory is the paintings, since its period is exactly that of the Impressionists and their followers; Renoir, Manet, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Bonnard, you can drown in colour if you’re not careful. Also architectural plans and models, furniture, oodles of sculpture; it carries on where the Louvre leaves off, and does a superb job.