Place des Vosges wasn't always the oldest planned square in Paris.

For two centuries, it was a royal palace's backyard where Henri II took a lance through the eye during a tournament in 1559, dying ten days later. His widow, Catherine de' Medici, overcome with grief, demolished the entire palace and abandoned the site. It took another king, Henri IV, to transform this cursed ground into Paris's first public square in 1612, ringed by 36 identical red-brick pavilions that made symmetry fashionable before Versailles was even imagined.

The square has sheltered everyone from Cardinal Richelieu to Victor Hugo, whose apartment at number six is now a museum. Hugo wrote much of Les Misérables here, gazing down at duellists who treated the arcades as Paris's unofficial combat arena.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours reveal how this square pioneered urban planning in Paris, trace the Jewish quarter's expansion from its edges, and explain why Richelieu, Hugo and Jim Morrison all gravitated to the Marais.