Gray: The Château of the Baron Martin and the Franc-Comtois Roof of the Town Hall

Required Activities

• In the museum, work through the fourteen ground-floor salons to the Louis XVI Salon des Glaces, and find Prud'hon's pastel portraits of M. and Mme Febvre — drawn while he was sheltering at Rigny outside Gray in the mid-1790s, and of the very family whose daughter married the baron Martin this museum is named after

• Stand back from the town hall of 1567–1572 and read it twice: count the nine round arcades along its 37 m front and the superposed Corinthian and composite columns cut in red Sampans marble, then look up at the polychrome glazed tiles that make the roof unmistakably Burgundian

• In the basilica, go to the east end and look at the 15 m central window: the stone tracery itself is carved as a Tree of Jesse, flamboyant work tied to the same hands as the royal monastery of Brou — then find the two relics that made a parish church into a basilica in 1948, the heart of Saint Pierre Fourier, here since 1641, and the miraculous statue of Notre-Dame de Gray, here since 1802

• Walk or ride down off the upper town to the Saône quays, then look back up: from the water you can see what the upper town was for, with the tour du Paravis and the enceinte wall of the medieval castle standing on the lip of the bank above you

• Cross to the place de la Sous-Préfecture and look into the natural history museum, collected since the middle of the 19th century, for its plates from Buffon's Histoire Naturelle and the pressed herbaria beside the fossils