Musée d'Orsay

Every three minutes, another visitor discovers the 550-volt third rail still running beneath your feet in this tunnel that once connected trains directly from Orleans to central Paris. The massive stone façade you're admiring right now was Victor Laloux's brilliant deception... he designed what looks like an elegant palace to hide the most technologically advanced railway station in Europe back in 1900. You're standing where the Palais d'Orsay once stood until angry Parisians burned it down during the 1871 Commune. Laloux rebuilt this entire structure in just two years, creating what critics called an "anachronism" because everyone expected a futuristic-looking train station, not this limestone masterpiece that perfectly matched the Louvre across the river. Look closely at those three giant stone figures above you... they represent the railway destinations of Bordeaux, Toulon, and Nantes, carved when this was the terminus for southwestern France. The real shocker? This building housed a 370-room luxury hotel called Hotel Palais d'Orsay along its western side, and General de Gaulle actually announced his return to power from inside these walls. When the platforms became too short for modern trains in 1939, Orson Welles used the abandoned station as a film set for Kafka's "The Trial". The French nearly demolished the whole thing for a hotel complex until François Mitterrand saved it, transforming this architectural time capsule into the museum that now welcomes over three million visitors annually.