Fontaine de Mars

Look at this fountain. It seems modest for something with such an outsized story behind it. Built around 1806, the Fontaine de Mars was part of Napoleon's sweeping answer to a simple but urgent question he put to the prefect of Paris: what do people need most? The answer was water. Old fountains barely trickled, and private entrepreneurs had taken control of distribution. Napoleon banned that outright and made clean drinking water a public right, free for everyone. This fountain was one of 15 he ordered built across the city.

The name sounds purely military, but the two figures carved into the stone tell a more layered story. Mars, god of war, stands alongside Hygieia, goddess of health. The pairing made perfect sense here, because this fountain was designed to serve the nearby Gros-Caillou military hospital. The hospital is long gone. The fountain stayed.

Look closely at the stone and you'll spot a small inscription reading "CRUE JANVIER 1910". On January 28th of that year, the Seine rose more than 8 meters above normal and stayed high for 45 days. Nine out of ten Parisians thought the city was finished and doomsday had arrived.

And just across the street, in the restaurant with the same name as the fountain, Barack and Michelle Obama sat down for dinner in 2009, fresh from the D-Day commemorations in Normandy. The reservation list reportedly filled itself for years on the echo of that single meal.