Egyptian coffins rest beneath a fortress that became a palace

A fortress became a courtyard argued over by kings

You are standing inside the Cour Carrée, the square heart of the Louvre Palace — and directly beneath your feet, in the galleries just below ground level, lies a scatter of the dead pulled from Egyptian tombs three thousand years before this courtyard was ever paved. A sarcophagus trough carved for Djedhor, the coffin of the priest Ânkhapy, and the funerary set of a woman named Tamoutnéfret all sit within thirty metres of this spot, folded into the museum's Egyptian rooms with no wall between the antiquities and the render of the courtyard above them.

The palace around you did not begin as a palace at all. Philip II raised a fortress here at the turn of the thirteenth century to anchor the city wall he built against English invasion from Normandy — the Medieval Louvre Castle whose foundations still run beneath the courtyard's paving. Kings did not live in it until Charles V, and it was Francis I, in 1546, who tore down the old keep to start building the Renaissance quadrangle now enclosing you, a project carried on for over a century by his successors and finished, on its east face, by the great classical Louvre Colonnade that Louis XIV's own architects — Le Vau, Le Brun, Perrault — raised between 1667 and 1674.

For three hundred years this square was a construction site worked in relays by successive kings, each one erasing part of what the last had built, so that the walls around you are less a single design than a long argument in stone between monarchs who never met.

The Palais-Royal sheltered rebels and buried a murdered deputy

The Palais-Royal, a short walk northwest of the Cour Carrée, was the gunpowder store of the Revolution rather than its throne room. On July 12, 1789, the journalist Camille Desmoulins climbed onto a table in its gardens, at what was then the Café Foy, and told a crowd of six thousand that a massacre of patriots was coming. Two days later, the Bastille fell. The palace's private grounds put it beyond the reach of the police, and in the weeks after the speech it sheltered soldiers who had refused to fire on Parisian crowds — freed from prison and given cover under the palace's own roofs, a sanctuary the crown itself had built and could no longer control.

The killing that followed came four years later, in the same gardens. Louis-Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, a deputy who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI, was cut down at the Café Février inside the Palais-Royal in 1793 — a piece of political retribution carried out in the same arcades where the Revolution had first found its voice. It made him one of the Convention's first martyrs, buried with state honours while his killer went to the guillotine.

Even the ground beneath the gardens has a small violent history of its own. Two years before 1789, an extraordinary underground arena had opened there — 112 metres long, glass-roofed, with forty shops sunk beneath it and space for horse races and spectacle. It burned during the Revolution, and its footprint now holds the gardens' central fountain: pleasure architecture destroyed in the same convulsion its own neighbourhood had helped ignite.

A house nearby cracked the code of hieroglyphs

Nearby, Fontaine de la Croix du Trahoir has stood at a crossroads used for public executions in earlier centuries, its calm façade sitting over a much rougher civic memory.

Molière was born close to here, on what is now Rue Saint-Honoré, and a house nearby claims a stranger distinction: it was there, in September 1822, that Jean-François Champollion worked out the principle for decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs — a discovery that gives an odd symmetry to the Egyptian coffins resting under the Cour Carrée itself.

Two blocks on, the Café de la Régence hosted the great chess minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — Philidor, La Bourdonnais, Morphy — turning a Paris café into an unlikely arena of intellectual combat, in keeping with a neighbourhood that has always drawn people who like an audience.

A buried seabed decided where Paris could build

Zoom out from the Louvre and the story becomes one of water and stone working together. The Seine, a few hundred metres south, made this the natural crossing point for the old Roman and medieval city, and every fortification here — from Philip II's wall to the towers whose stumps still surface in nearby foundations — was built to hold that crossing. The wider first arrondissement grew up as the administrative and commercial spine of Paris precisely because it commanded that river.

Underneath all of it lies a bed of Eocene siltstone, marl and claystone, laid down when this basin sat beneath a shallow sea some 34 to 56 million years ago, now buried under looser sand, gravel and clay washed down more recently by the Seine itself. It is unglamorous rock, but it is the reason central Paris sits low and flat around its river rather than perched on a hill, and why builders here have always dug rather than climbed.