Paris is home to the finest museums in the world. Unfortunately, they are also some of the most crowded. Nearly four million people head to the Pompidou Center and the Musée d'Orsay each year. The Louvre receives more than twice as many.
My houseguests often return from one of these trio of giants with tales of woe: long lines, crowded corridors and obnoxious elbow-pushers. Then there is the security problem. Organized teams of pickpockets became so aggressive at the Louvre last April that its 200 security guards went on strike for a day, forcing the museum to close.
But there are about 175 museums in Paris, and most offer a stress-free visit. They can be modest, like the two rooms devoted to Edith Piaf in an apartment on the eastern edge of town; they can be grand, like the Musée d'Archéologie Nationale, just outside town, which displays 30,000 Gallo-Roman objects in a chateau rebuilt in the 16th century.
A cluster of must-see museums in the boring, bourgeois 16th Arrondissement easily fits into a day-long outing on a Saturday or Sunday.
Included is by far the most luscious overlooked museum in Paris, the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet. This Asian art museum has the finest collection of Khmer art in the West (including sculptures from Angkor Wat). Its temporary exhibitions draw big crowds, but the rooms housing the permanent collection are delightfully empty. They present 45,000 works of art, including Chinese bronzes and lacquerware, Thai manuscripts, Indian sculptures, Japanese silk paintings, Moghul jewelry, Afghan glassware and Tibetan mandalas, in open, well-lit modern spaces. The building, constructed by the industrialist Émile Guimet in 1889, has preserved its architectural signature: an open, double-floored, oval-shaped library whose leather-bound volumes sit in curved wood bookshelves.
If you're lucky, the nearby Palais Galliera, situated in a Renaissance-style palace, will be open for a temporary exhibition. A show dedicated to Azzedine Alaïa just ended; the next, on a century of fashion photography in Condé Nast publications like Vogue and Vanity Fair, runs from March 1 to May 25.
Your next destination could be the blessedly uncrowded Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Its permanent collection covers major artistic trends since the beginning of the 20th century, with works by Picasso, Dufy, Modigliani, Rouault, Léger, Braque, Utrillo, Giacometti and Rauschenberg. It is worth a visit for the Matisse room alone, which offers two of the artist's monumental triptychs of "Dance" murals from the early 1930s. Some of Robert Delauney's best paintings are hung in Room #1. Sit on the bench with one of his 1938 "Rhythm" paintings for the Salon de Tuileries behind you. It is the perfect perch for gazing out the window through the trees and contemplating the Eiffel Tower and the boats moving up and down the Seine. The view is best when the trees are bare.
Next door is the Palais de Tokyo, which is more successful as an indoor playground for kids than as a repository of art objects. But the gift shop is a fine place to find oddball art books and publications, and the lively, high-ceilinged restaurant Tokyo Eat is an appealing place to stop for lunch.
From there, it's an easy walk to the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine. With three galleries and 86,000 square feet of space, it calls itself the largest architectural museum in the world. It is a shrine to 12 centuries of French building styles, including a glass-roofed main gallery housing 350 plaster-cast reproductions of medieval, Gothic and Renaissance church architecture: cathedral facades, gargoyles, pillars, statues, crypts. It sits on a hill overlooking the curve of the Seine, and each of the two dozen or so soaring windows along a long, parallel gallery offers a different view of the Eiffel Tower just across the river.
End the day with the modest house where Honoré de Balzac lived and wrote between 1840 and 1847 under the pseudonym Lord R'hoone. The study is preserved much as it was when he worked there, with velvet-covered walls, colored glass windows and a wooden work table.
But even after you've finished the museums of the 16th, your no-stress tour has just begun. Try, for instance, the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. This small epistolary museum displays more than 250 pieces spanning seven centuries, including a missive in Cyrillic from Tsarina Catherine II, a papal bull from Clement VIII giving absolution to King Henri IV, a letter of Marie-Antoinette, calculations by Einstein explaining his theory of relativity and a draft of a speech by President Kennedy.
There are also numerous homes of famous people that have been turned into museums, including those of the painters Gustave Moreau (just renovated) and Eugène Delacroix, the scientist Louis Pasteur, the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine and the statesman Georges Clémenceau.
If you have time for only one, make it the Musée Nissim de Camondo near the Parc Monceau. It holds one of the world's great collections of late-18th-century French furnishings and decorative arts. All the objects have been left as they were when the patriarch, Moïse de Camondo, a wealthy Jewish banker from Constantinople, and his family lived there.
It also holds a tragic story. When Camondo died in 1935, he left his mansion and collections to France's Musée des Arts Décoratifs. His only condition was that the house be turned into a museum and named after his son, Nissim, who died as a combat pilot for France in World War I.
The family felt protected when the Nazis occupied France. A marble plaque at the entrance to the house states otherwise. It announces that Camondo's daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, his last descendants, were deported by the Germans between 1943 and 1944. They died at Auschwitz.
The French government kept its word, turning the house into a museum and naming it after Camondo's son.
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