Musée Carnavalet audio guide,
five stops, free.

Stand back from this canvas and the fortress fills it, a wall of stone towers with tiny figures swarming at their feet and along the top. It was never quite that big. Hubert Robert made it bigger on purpose. Paris knew him as Robert des ruines, Robert of the ruins, a nickname he brought home from eleven years in Rome among the circle of Piranesi. In the summer of 1789 the greatest ruin of his career was being made in front of him.

For Parisians the Bastille meant one thing. Until 1785, a sealed letter from the king, a lettre de cachet, could lock up anyone who displeased royal power without a trial, and this was where they went. On the fourteenth of July 1789 the crowd stormed it. The very next day its demolition was ordered, and the contract went to a builder named Pierre-François Palloy.

Now find the big stone in the lower right corner. Robert carved his own caption into it: demolition of the Bastille, the twentieth of July 1789, H. Robert painted it. Six days after the storming. He does not show you the fighting. He shows you the morning after, workmen already up on the walls, smoke drifting across the sky, the towers lit like a monument that knows its time is up. The museum calls it the ideal ruin, history turned into a meditation while the stones were still warm.

The painting went straight to the Salon of 1789, number 36 in the catalogue. A label on the back records that it once belonged to Lafayette, and later to Madame de Rémusat. The Society of Friends of the Carnavalet gave it to the museum in 1929.

Now turn around. The case facing the painting holds what is left of the real building: its keys, handcuffs, fragments of stone. Palloy did not just knock the Bastille down; he turned its stones into commemorative souvenirs. In the middle of the room stands a heater in the shape of the fortress, made by the Olivier manufactory and later installed for the National Convention at the Tuileries. Within a few years of the storming, the Bastille had become furniture.

Robert did not stay a spectator. He was arrested in October 1793 and spent ten months in the prisons of Sainte-Pélagie and Saint-Lazare, where he painted at least fifty-three canvases. He was freed a week after Robespierre fell, by which time the prison in this picture had been gone for years.

No piano. That is the first thing to notice about this portrait of the man the museum calls the lion of the piano. No keyboard, no score, no concert hall. Just a young man in a black coat, arms folded, a ring on his finger, standing against a bare grey wall and looking straight back at you.

Franz Liszt was born in 1811, so here he is twenty-seven or twenty-eight. The painter, Henri Lehmann, was younger still. Born in Kiel, he had come to Paris at seventeen to study under Ingres and became one of his most accomplished pupils. In 1838 Lehmann went to Rome, where Ingres was then running the French Academy, and there he fell in with Liszt and with Liszt's companion, the writer Marie d'Agoult. He painted them both.

Liszt sat for this one at the Villa Massimiliana in Lucca, and Lehmann finished it in Rome. Look at the lower left corner and you will see how he signed it. AMICVS AMICO, Latin for from a friend to a friend. Then his initials, H and L woven together. Then Rome, and the year in Roman numerals, 1839. It reads like a dedication, and the portrait looks like one: no flattery, no props, only the long hair, the pale face, the stare.

You can see the lesson of Ingres in the pure, clean line. The mood, though, is pure Romanticism, which is why the picture hangs in this part of the route. After the revolution of 1830, Paris became a melting pot of writers, musicians and artists, and this section gathers their faces: Victor Hugo, the novelist Eugène Sue, Liszt, and Marie d'Agoult, also painted by Lehmann. Find her portrait, and you have the couple in the same room again. In the cases are Eugène Sue's writing desk and statuettes by the sculptor Dantan.

The painting was shown at the Salon of 1840, in the Louvre. That was just before Lisztomania took hold and his concerts began to draw fanatical crowds across Europe. It came to the Carnavalet in 1942, a gift from a Madame Ollivier.

Take one last look at the hands. Within a few years crowds would fight to watch them play, and here the painter has tucked them away, folded over the black coat, perfectly still.

Stand in front of the counter and look up. A peacock is perched on the frieze above you, letting its long tail spill down the woodwork, and straight ahead a second one fans its feathers against a disc of glowing stained glass. This is not a room about a shop. It is the shop, the whole interior of a Paris jeweller's, moved here piece by piece.

Georges Fouquet took over his father's jewellery business in 1895. He was already working with Alphonse Mucha, the Czech artist whose posters of Sarah Bernhardt had gone up all over Paris in 1895 and made him suddenly famous. In 1899 the two of them made a gold and enamel serpent bracelet for Bernhardt herself. After the great Exposition of 1900, Fouquet opened a new shop at number 6 rue Royale and asked Mucha to design the interior. It opened in 1901.

Mucha rarely worked in three dimensions, and he did not do this alone. Léon Fargue made the stained glass and the sculptor Auguste Seysses made the figures. Look at how little in here is straight. The wood curls, the metal climbs like a plant, flowers and coral and animals creep over every panel. The museum calls it the full flowering of Art Nouveau, with its taste for asymmetry and the curve they called the whiplash line.

Now look down. The mosaic under your feet was remade exactly from Mucha's original drawings.

The shop did not last. By 1923 Art Nouveau had gone out of fashion, and Fouquet replaced the decor with something newer. But he did not throw it away. Out of respect for his friend's work, he had it taken apart piece by piece and stored, and later he gave it to the Carnavalet. It stayed in pieces for decades. In 1989, when the museum took over the neighbouring Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, the shop was finally put back together, at the same time as the Wendel ballroom and the dining room of the Café de Paris, which you will find next door, designed by Henri Sauvage and furnished by Louis Majorelle.

So this is where the walk ends: in a jeweller's that was out of date twenty-two years after it opened, and survived only because the man who owned it could not bring himself to break it up. The peacocks were saved by a shopkeeper.