Located in a dip on the sloping rue Cortot, the museum appropriately fills the rooms of one of Montmartre’s oldest houses, the Maison de Rose de Rosimond, bought by an actor in Molière’s troupe in the 1680’s. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Montmartre was a small, windmill-filled village that produced porcelain well before paintings. On the museum’s lowest level are displays of this porcelain and pottery, as well as other artifacts from these early years. Take a stroll through the house’s small, rustic courtyard garden, to reach the start of the musée. Once inside, you’ll find just about everything you’d expect from such an institution, and also some things that are a bit more surprising. Known primarily as the center of avant-garde art in Paris during the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, everyone from Toulouse-Lautrec to Satie, Renoir, Utrillo, Dufy, Valadon, Modigliani, and Picasso lived here at some point.

On the main and upper floors are exposed various items from the museum’s collection of over 10,000 documents and artifacts. These are often changed out, and even displaced for large temporary exhibitions, but some of the staples include paintings and posters by Willette and Steinlen for the Chat Noir Cabaret, not to mention several posters Toulouse-Lautrec, including his groundbreaking view of singer Aristide Bruant, seen from the back. The slightly tattered aspects of these posters serve to remind us that these works of art were the billboards of their day: lucky Belle Époque pedestrians! Other highlights of the museum’s permanent collection are a room set up like a typical fin-de-siècle working-class bar, complete with a metal-topped comptoir, and a scale model of the Butte in 1956. This model took a year to make, and shows how much, and yet how little, has changed in this neighborhood that often feels timeless.

Despite its impressive collection, the Musée de Montmartre has kept a sort of informal air. The place’s interior set-up hasn’t been greatly altered, and so at times moving around can be a bit of an adventure, as when you almost collide with someone emerging from a doorway located off the middle of a flight of stairs. And it’s this, combined with some fantastic artifacts, that makes the Musée de Montmartre a great testament to the smaller things in the history of one of Paris’ most distinctive neighborhoods. And a great place to wander for a few hours on a trip to the Butte.