Le Petit Paris Museum & Duchamp Opera House

Versailles moved to the swamp. In 1830, French Royalist refugees fleeing the Revolution brought their cultural expectations to St. Martinville and demanded grand entertainment in a remote bayou town deep in the swamp. What they got was one of the earliest opera houses in Louisiana, and the building earned the town the nickname Le Petit Paris. The audiences who filled this opera house in the 1830s included families who had danced at Versailles. The opera house now houses a theater on the second floor, a fine art gallery at street level, and the official St. Martinville gift shop. It sits on Main Street in the walkable historic core. Go for the improbable fact of what was claimed in that place at that time — aristocratic memory translated into cypress and performance, hundreds of miles from anything resembling a metropolis.