Mid-19th-century travelers flocked to Paris to join locals at the palatial Grands Magasins Dufayel, a store unlike any other. Shoppers were entertained by an orchestra and indoor garden, cycling track, art collection, cinema and theater underneath a huge glass roof. Innovative retailer Georges Dufayel forever changed society, as Anna Meakin describes.

Paris is adored for its grand boulevards, parks and squares, monuments and architectural wonders, and Haussmann's grand plan that makes it easy to navigate this beautiful city. But Thierry Picot reminds us that it wasn't always so as he shows us Paris through the ages with a modern walk that hints at what it was like to be in Balzac's Paris.

Paris has WWII monuments, but decades later few know French soldiers rounded up Jewish citizens sent to their deaths in La Grande Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv. Jewish history expert Toni Kamins describes shameful days in French history that are the true story noted in bestselling novel and film Sarah's Key.

In Part 2 of Sarah Towle's story, she details Paul Cézanne's return to Provence and his deliberate painting process that lead to his creation of Cubist style of painting. The revered painter, considered a prophet, left an enduring legacy with a full catalogue of masterpieces and a famous atelier in Provence you can visit today.

Paul Cézanne's paintings are today at least familiar to most, revered by many. But Cézanne and his 19th-century contemporaries Monet, Degas and Manet were considered radicals rejected by the prestigious yet classically-oriented Académie des Beaux-Arts. Sarah Towle shares the struggles that shaped the artist who forever changed the art we enjoy today.

The story opens on a pitch-black March night. A solitary man in threadbare trousers, hands numb from biting winds, trudges along the barren landscape that separates him from certain destitution and future hope. The tale that unfolds is a masterpiece by Émile Zola, who sought in fiction what he would ultimately achieve in life.

Sarah Towle introduces us to Dr. Marie Curie, better known as Madame Curie, a woman with many "firsts": the first woman in France to receive a university doctorate, become a professor at the University of Paris, win a Nobel Prize, and be buried at the Panthéon, not because of who she married but who she was.

Before we had cameras, film and video to record the course of human events, we had painters. And France in the years spanning the Revolution, the first Republic and the first Empire had Jacques-Louis David: the photojournalist of his time.

Silhouetted against the sky above the Louvre entrance across from the Palais Royal, angels rejoice in the glory of the arts and the power of the Second Empire: a neo-Renaissance extension of the Louvre expresses the artistic ambitions of Napoléon III.