Paris guide

What are second tier and back door sites for you?

Fair question. But hard to answer. This is my 6th visit, so I’ve visited all the top 20 sites you find in guidebooks and videos. I have a few I plan to revisit: the restored Notre Dame, Saint Chapelle and the new Monet exhibit at L’Orangerie, but it’s the neighborhoods and sites I don’t know I’d like to learn about and a good guide could really help.

A volunteer from the Paris Greeters program can show you their neighborhood. You need to make a request well in advance.
And after six visits, one of the Paris Secret or Mysterious Paris guidebooks will lead you to all sorts of interesting places and curiosities such as the smallest house, the oldest house, Roman building blocks incorporated into buildings used today. My Parisian-born spouse learned a lot when we used it.

Doable easily without a guide, if you haven't been....the Cathedral Basilica of St-Denis just north of Paris. Many kings and queens of France are interred there. The church is beautiful as well. Often skipped because it isn't close in to the other big sights, but I highly recommend it. The church is free to visit, but there is a charge to visit the necropolis, about 17 euro I think. The Passion Monuments covers that, if you have one.

(Just fyi, it makes a good companion to a visit to the Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Reims, where almost every king of France was crowned, if you get to Reims.)

Alas, I haven't ever used a guide, so have no recs for anyone. Bonne chance!

You can get a private tour from Paris Walks (paris-walks.com); I've never done a private but have take a couple of their regular tours and very much enjoyed them.