The national library of France has a museum, and almost no guide to Paris mentions it. It takes up the first floor of the Richelieu site, the palace on rue Vivienne that has been the library’s home for four centuries. Across twelve hundred square metres it lines up around nine hundred pieces drawn from all its holdings: Roman coins, illuminated manuscripts, engravings, globes, scores, stage costumes and a human heart.
One thing is worth knowing straight away, because it decides how much you spend: the salle Ovale, the great reading room, is free and open to anyone, with no card and no age limit, while the museum proper costs 15 euros. They are two different visits in the same building, and you can make them one at a time.
What is Voltaire’s heart doing inside a library?
Let’s begin!
1. Three spaces in one palace, and two of them are free
Where do you start, if it is your first time?
The Richelieu site has reopened after a very long building site, and it now divides into three things that should not be confused. There are the reading rooms of the research library, which ask for a pass. There is the museum, on the first floor, with its ticket. And there is the salle Ovale, which is the surprise: twenty thousand volumes on open shelves, a hundred and sixty seats and eleven thousand comic books, from Rodolphe Töpffer’s plates of the 1830s to the latest Asterix.
You can walk in, sit down, read and leave without paying anything and without signing up. If you are travelling with teenagers, keep it in mind: it is one of the few places in central Paris where you can spend an hour under cover without buying something.
The research rooms are another thing again, and you need the pass to get into them. The finest is the salle Labrouste, nine skylit domes set on sixteen cast-iron columns thirty centimetres wide and ten metres high, with landscapes painted in the lunettes above the shelves: if you happen to pass an open door, look inside.
2. The Grand Camée de France, the largest cameo antiquity has left us
It is a hardstone thirty-one centimetres by twenty-six and a half, sardonyx carved across five superimposed layers, and its date falls around AD 23. Keep the measurement in mind while you look at it, because that is what makes the difference. The museum gives it as the largest cameo antiquity has left us, and this is no brochure superlative: a block of sardonyx that large and that even, with five usable layers of colour, is an event in itself.
What makes it a piece to be read, though, is the journey it has made. It belonged to the Treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle, which Saint Louis assembled in the thirteenth century around the relics of the Passion. In 1343 Philip VI pawned it with pope Clement VI, and in 1379 Charles V redeemed it and took it back to the Sainte-Chapelle. On 1 May 1791 Louis XVI ordered it to be deposited at the Cabinet des médailles. In 1804 it was stolen, and it turned up in Amsterdam without its mount, which the thieves had melted down: it came back to Paris in February 1805.
If you have already seen the Sainte-Chapelle and wondered where its treasury ended up, part of the answer is in this case.
3. Voltaire’s heart, in a secular reliquary
Voltaire came back to Paris on 10 February 1778, after twenty-eight years away. He was eighty-three and a crowd welcomed him; on 30 March he was crowned with laurel at the Théâtre-Français, and on 30 May he died at the house of his friend the marquis de Villette. Villette had the body autopsied and embalmed by an apothecary named Mitouard, and had the heart taken out.
From there begins a journey of eighty-six years, and it is worth following, because it explains how that heart ended up in a display case. Villette bought back the château of Ferney, turned a room into a shrine, had it decorated with forty-one portraits of the philosopher’s friends and placed the heart in a reliquary on a velvet cushion, above an altar. In 1785 he had to sell Ferney and took the heart to his château at Pont-Sainte-Maxence. His son kept it until his own death, in 1859, and left it by will to a bishop; the collateral heirs went to court and won in 1861, but they had no idea what to do with the relic.
A law settled the matter. Since on 30 March 1791 Voltaire’s body had been declared property of the nation, on 16 December 1864 the heart was handed to Victor Duruy, the minister of public instruction. It is here now, embalmed inside its reposoir, and the BnF record opens with a sentence that resembles him: his spirit is everywhere, his heart is here.
4. The two pagodas from Jingdezhen, spoils of war saved twice
In the salon Louis XV, the room whose rocaille decoration comes from the King’s cabinet, stand two Chinese porcelain pagodas 2.40 metres high. They came out of the kilns of Jingdezhen in the Qianlong era, between 1735 and 1796, and they belong to a luxury production China made for European houses. The BnF gives the number that counts: of porcelain pagodas over two metres tall, fourteen have been recorded in the whole world, five of them in pairs, and one of those pairs is this.
The rest reads like a novel, and I am summing it up for you because no label tells it whole. In 1795 the victorious young French Republic removed the two pagodas from the collections of William V of Orange-Nassau, stadtholder of the United Provinces. In 1815, after the congress of Vienna, France had to give back the works it had taken, and the pagodas escaped the restitution on a bureaucratic excuse: “these objects having arrived with neither catalogue nor description”, it proved impossible to hand them to the Dutch official. Then they disappear from view, resurface at an exhibition in 1838, and in 1917 they are judged foreign to the collections of the cabinet des Médailles and deposited at Sèvres, where they survive the bombing of 1942. They have come back here restored, put together piece by piece.
5. The rhinoceros Dürer never saw
At the beginning of 1515 an Indian rhinoceros landed at Lisbon, sent as a diplomatic gift and destined for the menagerie of Manuel I of Portugal. It was the first live rhinoceros Europe had seen since Roman times. The news reached Nuremberg in the form of a written description and a rough sketch, by an unknown hand, and Albrecht Dürer made a woodcut from it without ever seeing the animal: he gave it plate armour, scales on its legs, a little horn on its back.
The result is false, and it has outlasted the animal it portrayed. That animal, for its part, did not last: at the end of 1515 Manuel sent it as a gift to pope Leo X, and the ship went down in the gulf of Genoa at the start of 1516, with all its crew. The engraving stayed, and stayed for a long time: in natural history books the armoured rhinoceros is the image of the animal until 1741, when Clara reached Holland, a female who toured Europe for twenty years and whom anyone could go and look at. When you stop in front of this sheet, you are looking at two centuries in which an image beat a fact.
6. Audubon’s birds, 435 plates at life size
How big can a book be?
The Birds of America by John James Audubon, printed in London between 1827 and 1838 by Robert Havell father and son, runs to 435 plates in etching and aquatint coloured by hand, with more than 400 species drawn at life size. To fit inside the sheet, the flamingos and the herons are folded into poses that will look to you like a stylistic whim and are in fact a constraint of printing.
Audubon had been born in Saint-Domingue, then a French colony, and he painted birds he had watched himself in America, in their own surroundings. Some of the species he portrayed no longer exist, and that changes the way you look at the plate: it is no longer only a masterpiece of publishing, it is a piece of evidence.
7. The Roman de Renart, and the fox that changed its name
A manuscript from the first half of the fourteenth century, written in the north or the north-east of France, gathers in verse the stories of a fox called Renart who cheats everybody, and the wolf Ysengrin above all. Those stories are a satire of feudal society, and they were an enormous success.
So enormous that they changed the French you speak today. Before those tales the fox was called goupil; the character was called Renart; and from reading his exploits over and over the French took to calling the animal by the character’s name. Today the French for fox is renard, and this book is the reason. It is not often that you can point at a display case and say why a word exists.
8. The rooms that change every four months
A warning the museum publishes and no guide passes on: the most fragile pieces are rotated three times a year. That is no formality, because changing them means closing the galerie Mazarin and the rotonde, which are two of the finest spaces on the route. The published dates: the rotonde closes from 5 to 9 October 2026 and from 26 April to 1 May 2027, the galerie Mazarin from 11 to 20 January 2027 and from 10 to 18 May 2027.
The part you can count on is the beginning instead, which is the antiquities in the salle des Colonnes and the cabinet précieux. There, in the central case, is the Berthouville silver treasure, one of the highlights of the library’s collections. And it is worth knowing that those two rooms are no ordinary display: Phoenician and Palmyrene were deciphered inside those walls.
Practical information
Details checked on 26 September 2026 on the official site bnf.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The museum costs 15 euros full price and 10 reduced. The ticket paired with an exhibition costs 18 euros and 13. Holders of the Pass BnF lecture/culture or of the Pass Recherche go in free and without limits. The salle Ovale. It is free, open to everyone with no age limit and with no registration. Opening hours. The museum opens on Tuesday from 10:00 to 20:00, which is the late evening, and from Wednesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00. It closes on Mondays. Closing days. The museum stays closed on 1 January, Easter Monday, 1 May, Whit Monday, 14 July, 15 August and 25 December. It is open, on the other hand, on 8 May, on Ascension Day, and on 1 and 11 November. Attention: the galerie Mazarin and the rotonde close for the change of the fragile works on the dates written above. If you are coming for the baroque decoration of the Mazarin, check first. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is not included in the pass. Getting there. The entrance is at 5 rue Vivienne. The stops are Bourse on line 3 and Palais Royal - Musée du Louvre on lines 1 and 7. How long it takes. You see the museum in an hour and a half. The salle Ovale you take on separately, and how long you stay there depends on you alone.
The exhibitions on at the Richelieu site, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The Grand Camée comes from the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle, fifteen minutes away by metro. A few steps from rue Vivienne are the Musée du Louvre and the Musée des Arts décoratifs, which share the same palace. If books and printed images interest you, the Musée Cognacq-Jay in the Marais shows the same eighteenth-century France through the eyes of a collector, and the Musée des Arts et Métiers keeps Pascal’s calculating machine and the first cinematograph.
Photo credits: facade and galerie Mazarin by ZeusUpsistos (CC BY-SA 4.0); salle Ovale by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0); salle Labrouste by Stefan Drößler (CC BY 4.0); Grand Camée de France by Carole Raddato (CC BY-SA 2.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
