3 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.

Next to the St-Germain RER train station, this stone-and-brick château, with its dry moat, intimidating circular towers, and La Grande Terrasse, is one of the most spectacular of all French garden set pieces. The château itself, gleaming after a five-year renovation, dates to the 16th and 17th centuries, but a royal palace has stood here since the early 12th century, when Louis VI—known as Le Gros (the Plump)—exploited St-Germain's defensive potential in his bid to pacify the Île-de-France. A hundred years later, Louis IX (St. Louis) added the elegant Sainte-Chapelle, the château's oldest remaining section. Note the square-top, not pointed, side windows and the filled-in rose window on the back wall. Charles V (1364–80) built a powerful defensive keep in the mid-14th century, but from the 1540s François I and his successors transformed St-Germain into a palace with an appearance more domestic than warlike. Louis XIV was born here, and it was here that his father, Louis XIII, died. Until 1682, when the court moved to Versailles, it remained the country's foremost royal residence outside Paris, and several Molière plays were premiered in the main hall. Since 1867 the château has housed the impressive Musée des Antiquités Nationales (Museum of National Antiquities), holding a trove of artifacts, figurines, brooches, and weapons, from the Stone Age to the 8th century. Behind the château is André Le Nôtre's Grande Terrasse, a terraced promenade lined by lime trees. Directly overlooking the Seine, it was completed in 1673 and has rarely been outdone for grandeur or length.

This appealing museum in a historic priory is devoted to the work of artist Maurice Denis (1870–1943), his fellow Symbolists, and the Nabis—painters opposed to the naturalism of their 19th-century Impressionist contemporaries. Denis found the calm of the former Jesuit building, set above tiered gardens with statues and rosebushes, ideally suited to his spiritual themes, which he expressed in stained glass, ceramics, and frescoes as well as oils.