Visiting the Curie Museum in Paris

The Pierre and Marie Curie Museum—tucked quietly into the old Radium Institute on the campus of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris—is one of the most understated but important scientific museums in the city. It occupies the preserved laboratory spaces where Marie Curie, her daughter Irène, and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot carried out groundbreaking research in radioactivity from the 1890s through the 1930s. The museum is small, reflective, and resolutely authentic: nothing is dramatized, nothing staged. You stand in rooms where the Nobel Prizes were earned.

At the heart of the museum is Marie Curie’s office and laboratory, preserved almost exactly as they were at the time of her death in 1934. Wooden benches, glassware, electrometers, notebooks, and early radiation-measurement devices remain in their original positions. Unlike her early work in the makeshift shed on the Rue Lhomond, the Radium Institute was built specifically for her—funded by French, international, and American donors—to allow research into the medical and scientific potential of radium. It became one of the great centers of early 20th-century physics and chemistry.

The museum emphasizes both the scientific history and the human story. Panels describe Pierre and Marie’s partnership, Pierre’s accidental death in 1906, and Marie’s tireless continuation of their shared research. Other exhibits trace the later achievements of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, whose discovery of artificial radioactivity earned them the 1935 Nobel Prize—reinforcing the sense that this building housed not just a laboratory but a dynasty of scientific innovation.

For a visitor returning multiple times, especially after reading Dava Sobel’s biography, the museum gains emotional weight. Sobel’s portrait of Marie Curie—the discipline, the grief, the stubborn moral clarity—comes alive in the physical space. The rooms feel modest for the scale of the discoveries made there, and the lingering sense of danger from early radiation work is unmistakable.

The museum is quiet, intimate, and deeply respectful—a rare place where the history of science still inhabits its original walls.

Paris Bike Co.--The Place to Rent a Bike in Paris

 

I found Paris Bike Co. in 2019 the way most good things are found abroad—an internet search that kept turning up the same message: “Highly recommended.” The reviews were unanimous about one point in particular: Sam Weaver doesn’t just hand you a rental bike. He fits you. Properly. 

Sam Weaver--Owner, Paris Bike Co.

When I showed up, he took the time to check measurements, fine-tune saddle height, and make sure the bike felt like something I’d been riding for years, not something borrowed for a week. 2019 was my first time renting from Paris Bike Co., and that experience set the pattern. Every time I’ve returned to Paris—March 2020, September 2023, November 2025—the process has been the same: Sam dialed in the fit, checked the position, and made sure the bike was set up exactly for what I wanted to do--ride the daily training ride around L'hippodrome Longchamps.  It’s a level of care that’s rare in any rental situation, let alone in a major city.

In 2020, I rented the bike on March 11 planning to keep it until March 16. My flight back to America was March 17. On March 13 (Friday the 13th) the American border closed and the world shut down for Covid.  Most Americans panicked and headed for the airport.  

Sam said he had to shut down the shop, but I could keep the bike till Monday.  It turns out bakeries are essential businesses and stayed open during Covid. So I rode through the empty streets of Paris and ate at bakeries until I left on Tuesday.  By the time I flew back the plane was almost empty. I had a row to myself. 

Sam's clientele includes many triathletes and para-olympic competitors.  I have been in the shop when Sam was working with a local customer on fitting the bike.  He is a Californian. His French is fluent, but it is definitely with a California accent.  It's fun to listen to. 

The shop is located in Malakoff 9km south of Paris.  I go there in the Metro.  You can check out the shop or reserve a bike on parisbikeco.com 

   

Anselm Kiefer in the Panthéon--The first major new art installation in the Pantheon in a century

 

I returned to the Panthéon after previous visits over the past decade, to see the first new art exhibit in crypt of the Republic in a century.  And the exhibit is by a German  artist!— Anselm Kiefer. Six vast glass vitrines catching the cold light from the dome, full of wreckage and silence.

I walk into the Panthéon patriotism, heroic scale; the new exhibit by Kiefer is frailty and fragility and pain enclosed in glass. Commissioned for the 2020 panthéonisation of Maurice Genevoix, author of Ceux de 14, the German artist installed six towering glass-and-steel vitrines—now permanent—plus two large canvases that were shown on loan. In the six enclosures are rusted barbed wire, scorched garments, lead books, concrete shards, and sprigs of wheat sit in suspended collision, as if a battlefield had been archived rather than cleaned up.

The materials aren’t metaphors; they’re blunt instruments sharply contrasting celebration of heroes. The Pantheon is France’s national crypt of heroes—Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Curie—built to canonize clarity. Keifer's vitrines are enclosed chaos, monuments for a century that never stopped bleeding, a counter-monument to the patriotic and heroic. The work keys directly off Genevoix’s witness to the Great War; phrases from Ceux de 14 (so I have read about this book of World War I) run through the installations like exposed wiring. You don’t admire these pieces so much as absorb shock from them.

This is the first major new art commission in the Panthéon in nearly a century—the last comparable addition was Bouchard’s 1924 memorial. Kiefer isn’t just adding objects; he’s reopening the monument after a hundred years of stasis.

The clash between neoclassical order and Kiefer’s scorched-earth art is dramatic. The vitrines are not subtle. Kiefer puts the horror of war in the midst of patriotic celebration, a new dimension in this room that is the French nation’s memory chamber.

Standing in the great hall, I thought of how I was drawn to the patriotic and heroic sinceI was a child, but then saw the ruin and wreckage that is actual war. Kiefer puts the horror front and center in contrast to the beauty and majesty of the rest of the building and its art.

Mundolingua: A Word Museum Paris

Near Luxembourg Gardens in the 6th Arrondissement of Paris is Mundolingua a museum of words: "Stacks of books and dictionaries share space with dozens of digital screens, the intimate exhibit spaces at once cozy and quirky. Words in many languages and alphabets adorn the walls, and, as you wander from the first floor down to the building’s 17th-century cellar, you are surrounded by languages at every turn."

   

Please follow the link above if you are interested. Better yet, if you get to Paris add ths odd museum to your list of sites to vist.

Musee de l'Armee in Paris: A Vast Museum of French Military History

On this trip to Paris, I visited the Musee de l'Armee or the Army Museum. With more than 500,000 artifacts in 12,000 square meters (3 acres) of space, I walked a couple of miles seeing nearly a millennium of French military history.  The museum is located in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower on the south bank of the Seine River in the Invalides area of Paris.  
 

The featured exhibit currently is about the the French Resistance and about the Deportation of Jews to death camps. More than 250,000 Jews were sent east, mostly to die under Nazi occupation.  

The collection also includes suits of armor from Medieval France. 

Weapons and uniforms from the Napoleonic era up through World War II