The elegant Faubourg St Germain is home to some of the city's oldest and grandest families and the residence of the Prime Minister. Bon Marché, Paris' oldest department store, is in the rue du Bac. Across boulevard St Germain is the Carré Rive Gauche, a warren of streets lined with antiques shops to drool over. The Jardins du Luxembourg is the quintessential Paris park. The gardens are partly formal with laid out terraces and paths and partly less formal with lawns and mature trees, scattered with sculpture. There are orchards with three hundred varieties of apples and pears and an apiary, where you can take a course in bee keeping. On any day, the park is full of joggers and cyclists, chess players, children riding ponies or playing in sandpits and sailing boats on the pond and people sitting in the sun and strolling around.

In the early 1900's Montparnasse was home to Picasso, Chagall and Soutine and later, Henry Miller, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Man Ray. Today, the boulevard du Montparnasse is still full of night life. At No 102 is La Coupole, the huge art-deco brasserie and opposite, is Le Select, the classic late night café, which rarely sleeps. Further along, the literary café, La Closerie des Lilas, was a favourite with everyone from Hemingway to Lenin. The boulevard Edgar-Quinet has pleasant cafés and a market on Wednesday and Saturday mornings.

Other places, outside of Paris worth visiting are Versailles, Chantilly ( the racecourse, splendid chateau and stables) and Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh lived and worked for several years, both just north of Paris, or Fontainebleau and Barbizon, to the south of the city, Disneyland Paris and Giverny, where Monet lived.