Black Cat Tours

10/08/2026

The 9th arrondissement is officially named "Opéra." Not for the Palais Garnier, that came later. It was named for an opera house that burned to the ground in 1873.

Paris did this with all 20. Knights Templar headquarters. A family of medieval dyers. A spa village famous for mineral springs.

Each one carries a name almost no visitor ever hears.

Do you know your arrondissement by number or by what it was actually called?

The full list reads like a city that never stopped remembering itself.

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10/08/2026

The old rooster survived the Notre-Dame fire. Battered, but it survived, and that mattered enough that its replacement was built around the idea of survival itself.

On December 16, 2023, a new golden rooster was lifted by crane onto the rebuilt spire, 96 meters above the ground. Chief architect Philippe Villeneuve designed it himself, and he didn't just replace what was lost, he reimagined it. The new rooster's tail feathers curl upward like flames, a deliberate choice. Villeneuve called it his phoenix, describing the wings of fire as a reminder that the cathedral could rise from its own ashes.

Before it went up, Archbishop Laurent Ulrich placed relics inside a small cavity in the rooster's breast: fragments of the Crown of Thorns, along with remains of Saint Denis and Saint Genevieve. A sealed document went in beside them, carrying the names of nearly 2,000 people who worked on the cathedral's reconstruction.

The rooster carries older symbolism too. In French, "coq" is tied linguistically to "Gaulois," making it one of the country's oldest national emblems, and in Christian tradition, it represents light returning after darkness. It's the same symbolic role the original bronze rooster played for over a century before the fire took it down.

Villeneuve later joked that designing it had been so demanding he might need to talk to his therapist about it. What went up in its place is a bird built specifically to represent coming back from fire.

10/08/2026

À louer : nuit atypique sur les toits.
Point négatif : la lampe de chevet qui s’illumine toutes les heures.
Point positif : la lampe de chevet qui s’illumine toutes les heures.

🇬🇧 : For rent: a unique night on the rooftops.
Downside: the bedside lamp that turns on every hour.
Upside: the bedside lamp that turns on every hour.

(📸 : )

10/08/2026

Père Lachaise has 70,000 graves. Five of them will make you stop walking.

Americans tend to treat cemeteries as quiet, forgettable places.

The French turned this one into something else entirely.

Which famous person buried there would you most want to visit?

Five astonishing graves, from deeply romantic to genuinely disturbing.

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10/08/2026

The Eiffel Tower was never supposed to be permanent.

Gustave Eiffel was given a 20-year concession to keep it standing after the 1889 Exposition Universelle, expiring on January 1, 1910. After that, ownership reverted to the City of Paris, and the plan was straightforward: dismantle it and sell the metal for scrap.

Eiffel knew this from the start, so before the tower was even finished, he began looking for a scientific reason to keep it standing. He built a laboratory near the top for meteorological and astronomical work, but the discovery that actually saved the tower came from a newer technology: wireless telegraphy.

On November 5, 1898, engineer Eugène Ducretet used the tower to send the first radio contact in Morse code, reaching the Panthéon four kilometers away. Eiffel kept expanding the experiments from there. By 1907, signals reached a French naval base in Tunisia, 1,500 kilometers out. By 1908, the range had grown to roughly 6,000 kilometers, making it the longest-range wireless station in the world at the time.

That was enough. The French military built a permanent radiotelegraphy station beneath the Champ de Mars in 1909, and the tower became too strategically valuable to lose. On January 1, 1910, instead of demolition, the City of Paris extended Eiffel's concession, not for another 20 years, but for 70.

The tower's wireless station later played a real role in World War I, intercepting a German communication in 1914 that helped French command respond at the Battle of the Marne, the battle that stopped the German advance on Paris.

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