4 Best Sights in Side Trips from Paris, France

If you're fond of the swashbuckling novels of Alexandre Dumas, you’ll enjoy the Château de Monte-Cristo at Port-Marly on the southern fringe of St-Germain. Dumas built the château after the surging popularity of books like The Count of Monte Cristo made him rich in the 1840s. Construction costs and lavish partying meant he went broke just as quickly, and he skedaddled into a Belgian exile in 1849. You may find the fanciful exterior, where pilasters, cupolas, and stone carvings compete for attention, crosses the line from opulence to tastelessness, but—as in Dumas’s fiction—swagger, not subtlety, is what counts. Dumas’s mementos aside, the highlight of the interior is the luxurious Moorish Chamber, with spellbinding, interlacing plasterwork executed by Arab craftsmen (lent by the Bey of Tunis) and restored thanks to a donation from the late Moroccan king Hassan II.

Opposite the town hall, the Auberge Ravoux—where van Gogh lived and died—is now the Maison de Van Gogh. The inn opened in 1876 and owes its name to Arthur Ravoux, the landlord from 1889 to 1891. He had seven lodgers in all, who paid 3.50 francs for room and board (that was cheaper than the other inns in Auvers, where 6 francs was the going rate). A dingy staircase leads up to the tiny attic where van Gogh stored some of modern art's most iconic paintings under his bed. A short film retraces the artist's time at Auvers, and there's a well-stocked souvenir shop. Stop for a drink or lunch in the ground-floor restaurant.

The former home of van Gogh's closest friend in Auvers, Dr. Paul Gachet, is a local landmark. Documents and mementos evoke both van Gogh's stay and Gachet's passion for the avant-garde art of his era. The good doctor was himself the subject of one of the artist's most famous portraits (and the world's second most expensive painting when it sold for $82 million in the late 1980s); the actual creation of it was reenacted in the 1956 biopic, Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas. Even his house was immortalized on canvas, courtesy of Cézanne. A friend and patron to many of the artists who settled in and visited Auvers in the 1880s, Gachet also contributed to their artistic education by teaching them about engraving processes. Don’t overlook the garden—it provided the ivy that covers van Gogh's grave in the cemetery across town.

The landscape artist Charles-François Daubigny, a precursor of the Impressionists, lived in Auvers from 1861 until his death in 1878. You can visit his studio, the Maison-Atelier de Daubigny, and admire the mural and roof paintings by Daubigny and fellow artists Camille Corot and Honoré Daumier.