Paris can be priceless

The top draws of the French capital, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Museum, will usually cost you (queuing) time and money to visit. But there are other rewarding Parisian gems that are free to enter and normally have no lines. The following five are good alternatives, especially for repeat tourists to Paris who have perhaps already taken in the headline acts and are looking for something different

CITY OF PARIS MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

You can see the Eiffel Tower through the near floor­to­ceiling windows of this unsung museum, which is a stone’s throw from the River Seine and covers a variety of genres of modern art, from post­impressionism and Art Deco to Bauhaus and Cubism. The admission­free permanent collection includes pieces by Chagall and Picasso, but more impressive are the huge abstract canvases by Paris­born painter Robert Delaunay. You can pay extra to see temporary exhibitions here and at the neighbouring Palais de Tokyo, a site dedicated to modern and contemporary art. fact file

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The latter has a huge lobby where people chill out and flick through cultural magazines and newspapers. mam.paris.fr/en

RICHELIEU LIBRARY bnf.fr/en/richelieu

Hidden behind the Palais­Royal, this branch of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France is flaunting the fruits of a decade­long revamp. There are some fine architectural touches in the building — including a curving contemporary staircase — but the piece de resistance is the Salle Ovale, a vast, ornately decorated reading room with an outstanding collection of books, manuscripts and bandes dessinees (comics).

Students sit at desks adorned with glowing green lamps, and there are cosy chairs and sofas on which to relax with a book (pick a coffee­table tome on subjects as varied as Paris, James Bond, Communist architecture, and French pop and comedy).

Touch­screens show information about the library’s history and extensive catalogue.

CARNAVALET MUSEUM

Also looking swish after an impressive makeover is this excellent museum, the city’s oldest, located across two Renaissance­era mansions in the Marais district. Gallery spaces have been extended, brightened up and digitally enhanced, giving visitors a better grasp of episodes from Paris’ past. Explore the city’s origins as an Iron Age settlement for the Parisii tribe, its stint as the Roman colony of Lutetia, then relive Paris’ dramatic regal and revolutionary periods. Among the most visually impressive displays are the street and shop signs from yesteryear, the sumptuously furnished replicas of salons crafted by Charles Le Brun, who helped decorate the Palace of Versailles, and a breathtaking recreation of a fin­de­siecle Parisian jewellery boutique. carnavalet.paris.fr/ musee­carnavalet

THE MUSEUM OF ROMANTIC LIFE

Tucked down a quiet side street in Pigalle — a groovy neighbourhood south of Montmartre — this small but uplifting museum, set in a townhouse with lime­green window shutters, is the former home of 19th­century Dutch­French painter Ary Scheffer, who would entertain writers and artists such as George Sand, Eugene Delacroix and Charles Dickens here. Exhibiting period paintings, furniture, jewellery and other personal effects, the museum has a quaint setting, with a garden, courtyard and a wrought­iron greenhouse, from which the renowned Parisian bakery, Rose, runs a tearoom. museevieromantique.paris.fr/en

BALZAC’S HOUSE maisondebalzac.paris.fr/en

There’s another branch of Rose Bakery at this equally secluded museum, which honours Honore de Balzac and occupies the old garden folly in which he lived and wrote for seven years in the 1840s. Like his pal Victor Hugo, Balzac was a great chronicler of French life, his most celebrated masterpiece being La Comedie Humaine (The Human Comedy).

Characters from this vast collection of short stories and novels have been carved into woodblocks and are on display at this museum, where walls are etched with Balzac quotes. The museum is in Passy which, in Balzac’s time, was a village on the outskirts of Paris, but is now very much part of the urban sprawl (and in the 16th arrondissement). From the leafy garden you will glimpse the Eiffel Tower — which Balzac never lived to see. It wasn’t built until almost 40 years after his death.