Fontainebleau and Barbizon: The Château, the Forest and the Painters' Village

Required Activities

• Stand at the foot of the horseshoe staircase in the Cour du Cheval Blanc, renamed the cour des Adieux after 20 April 1814, when Napoleon — sixteen days after abdicating — told his Old Guard to go on serving France, then go inside and walk the Galerie Francois Ier that Rosso Fiorentino decorated between 1534 and 1540

• Follow the blue blazes of Denecourt-Colinet circuit no. 6 through the gorges and platières of Apremont above Barbizon, 10.9 km of the 365 km that Claude-Francois Denecourt, a soldier of the Grande Armée, started waymarking in 1842, and pick out three boulders whose shapes have earned them names

• Go inside the Auberge Ganne at 92 Grande Rue, now the departmental museum of the Barbizon painters, and find the cupboard doors and panels the lodgers painted on to settle their bills — the decor and furniture are the original ones; then walk up to no. 55, Théodore Rousseau's house and studio, where he lived from 1847 until his death in 1867

• Visit Millet's house and studio at 27-29 Grande Rue, where he lived from 1849 to 1875 and painted L'Angelus, then take the old chemin de messe out to Chailly-en-Bière and check the church tower against the one in the painting — it is Chailly's, not Barbizon's — and find Millet and Rousseau buried side by side in the churchyard