At least you can still swoon over the original staircase, with its lace-like balustrade and floridly carved ceilings overhead. It makes me think of the wonderful expression the French have: esprit de l’escalier. Literally: staircase wit (although it could surely also denote a particularly sparkling swoop of stairs). The term originates from Denis Diderot, one of Paris’s freethinking philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and a star of that era’s salons. He was the first to write about the frustrating phenomenon of formulating the perfect comeback only when en route home. You can well imagine how much esprit de l’escalier was experienced at the foot of the stairs of the Marais’ mansions, at the end of yet another glamorous salon soirée.
One nearby museum will make you feel you’re at a haut monde party. Go back down Rue de Thorigny and turn right into Rue de la Perle, walking west to Rue des Archives, on the corner of which you’ll find Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, set in another seventeenth-century hôtel. Okay, so the Museum of Hunting and Nature might not be for everyone — certainly not vegetarians and animal lovers — but it’s a wildly unique Parisian experience. Forget the nature bit in the museum’s title — that really just refers to chairs fashioned from deer antlers, or stuffed animals with stunned faces, no doubt victim to the ancient guns that are displayed in cabinets redolent with the musty aroma of furniture polish. It’s the décor you should really go for: the tapestry chairs against jewel-coloured brocade walls, the heaving crystal chandeliers above shiny parquetry, the gilt-framed, drama-filled paintings, and occasional conceptual pieces like a ceiling covered in beady-eyed owls. You feel like you’re in the grand house of a slightly sociopathic aristo-eccentric who could leap out from a secret door at any time, toting a diamond-encrusted rifle and velvet riding suit. Or like you’re walking through a madcap secret nightclub.
Right about now, your mind might be feeling a little over-stimulated, possibly even museumed-out. Never fear: there’s only one more on the agenda, and it’s just next door — and while the name Musée des Archives Nationales (the National Archives) might suggest a rather taxing experience, it’s actually quite a light-hearted one. There are some weighty documents, sure, such as Marie Antoinette’s final letter, but you mostly go for the gorgeous gardens, and the architectural beauty of the Hôtel de Soubise.
To get there, head a block south down Rue des Archives. Along the way you’ll see, on your left, a medieval doorway flanked by two pepperpot towers — it’s all that remains of the fourteenth-century hôtel originally on this site, built after the city walls were pushed out. As with the Hôtel de Sens, it was semi-fortified, guarded against a town of many dangers. There’s also little left of the building’s sixteenth-century reworking, by the Duc de Guise, who made his house the headquarters of the Catholic League during the Wars of Religion. Instead, what you’ll find is an early eighteenth-century design, which was given a monumental new front entrance, just left from the corner of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
The Hôtel de Soubise — as it became known — is the very definition of French Classicism, with its restrained use of frill-edged cornices and columns, a splash of sculptural detailing, along with tall, airy windows and a high-pitched roof. The overall sense is one of harmony. Walk slowly through the horseshoe-shaped courtyard, edged by a peristyle of columns, to take it all in. At the time of construction, this was one of the most magnificent entrances in town. It was second only to the Louvre, which was fitting, as the new owners were royalty. The Princesse de Soubise, and her husband, had been able to afford the land after her lucrative affair with the Sun King, Louis XIV. The palatial redevelopment plans were continued by her son; it’s he who oversaw the exquisite interiors.
Head straight ahead to the museum’s entrance. Not all of the Soubises’ rooms survived the building’s repurposing, in the early nineteenth century, into the city archives. But what’s left makes up for the loss. The prince’s Oval Room is all eau-de-nil and white, its decoration of sculpted garlands, shells and scrolls like something you might see on a Ladurée cake. In the prince’s handsome study, don’t miss the cabinets of leather-bound books, decorated in pastoral paintings by François Boucher. Upstairs the princess’s bedroom is a vision of gold and ruby, while her oval room, directly above the prince’s, is like a gilded cage, with cupids fluttering around the blue sky ceiling. These rooms are a slice of Versailles in the middle of Paris (it’s no surprise Sofia Coppola filmed some Marie Antoinette scenes here), and a perfect example of the Rococo style of eighteenth-century Paris. It’s curious that French interiors became more ornate as the exteriors toned down — but then, perhaps that’s another example of the famed French penchant for equilibrium.
Speaking of which, you can now balance out all of today’s indoor activity by strolling around the gardens of the archives, recently opened up to the public. Head through an arch in the courtyard colonnade, just to the east of the museum’s entrance, and you’ll be able to wind through leafy groves, scented by roses and hydrangeas — these are the former backyards of some of the Marais’ other mansions. Or veer to the left to admire the clipped perfection of the garden at the rear of the majestic Hôtel de Rohan (part of the archives complex, but mostly closed to the public).
When you’re ready for a well-deserved lunch, make your way back to Rue des Francs-Bourgeois and turn left. Before you reach the next cross street you’ll see, on your right, a lane taking you down to a park; cross this, and over Rue des Blancs Manteaux, and walk south along Rue des Guillemites. It’s around here that you can sense that the Marais wasn’t just a neighbourhood of splashy houses, it was also one of modest townhouses and apartment buildings, which were home to merchants and artisans, making for a vibrant, creative community. At the end of the street turn right into Rue Saint Croix de la Bretonnerie and immediately left into Rue du Bourg Tibourg, to your lunch destination: Mariage Frères.
It was the Mariage brothers, Nicolas and Pierre, who purportedly introduced tea to Paris, all those years ago, at the Sun King’s court. Their teas are quintessentially French, as finely blended as fragrance. In this olde-worlde tea salon, you can take your pick of over 500 brews, a number that speaks to the French love of tea. Parisian women have been taking tea in the afternoon since the nineteenth century, when salons de thé proliferated, so named because they recalled the décor of the salons of Parisian mansions, which began with that famous Blue Room, all glossy boiserie, baroque mirrors, frescoed ceilings and flashing chandeliers — not too unlike the Princesse de Soubise’s room you just admired. Perhaps the city’s salons de thé are a powerful symbol of post-Revolution Paris, where luxury is democratic, where everyone deserves a taste for the finer things in life.
When your feet are revived, meander eastwards to Rue Vieille du Temple, and from here find Rue des Rosiers, just to the north. Spend the rest of the afternoon and evening ambling around the streets, for the shopping as much as the people-watching. It’s a fascinating mix. There are bakeries for the Jewish residents, bars for the gay community and fashion boutiques for les bobos. Henri IV would be pleased to see his sociability project is still going strong. Sure, there are those who moan about the Marais changing, that the storied buildings are merely superficial façades; the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, the place where Beaumarchais wrote Le Mariage de Figaro no less, recently housed a pop-up Chanel store. But perhaps the Marais has simply gone full circle, back to a time when everyone wants to be here.
Itinerary
• Eiffel Tower: Champs de Mars, 5 Avenue Anatole France 75007; See toureiffel.paris for opening times and to pre-book a ticket (and reserve a restaurant table)
• Centre Pompidou: Place Georges-Pompidou 75004; 11.00-22.00 (Wednesday-Monday); closed Tuesday, 1 May
Paris is a city for looking up. For craning your neck to take in the romantically tiled and tinned rooftops, dotted with dormer windows, or the domes perched up high like architectural crowns. For oohing and ahhing at the pastel cherubs that dance around roses on a ceiling’s fr
escoed sky. Or for peeking into ornate apartments whose candelabra lamps flicker against white wedding-cake walls.
Parisians have long gazed skywards. The home of Gothic architecture, Paris’s skyline was once spiked with a succession of church spires that reached for the heavens as though in prayer. In an era when Paris’s dark and dank streets were caked in mud and running in rancid wastewater, the sky was seen as sublimely pure and clean.
Given the city’s lofty ambitions, it’s little surprise that the pioneer airships were invented here. Hot-air and hydrogen balloons first took to the Parisian skies in 1783. Soon after, the first manned hot-air flight — named une montgolfière after its creators, the Montgolfier brothers — wafted over the heads of amazed Parisians. Ballooning was an instant craze. It even inspired the latest poufs à la circonstance, the headdresses designed to commemorate topical events, and worn by Marie-Antoinette and her aristocratic friends. Ironically, the queen’s fondness for folly-adorned, flour-dusted hair, at a time when few Parisians could afford bread, was one of the reasons for the unrest that led to the French Revolution. So did ballooning not only inspire headdresses but ultimately head losses? Perhaps balloons were emblematic of freedom for downtrodden Parisians.
But the ultimate symbol of high Parisian hopes arose on the Champ de Mars, the very spot where the Robert brothers had tested their hydrogen-filled balloon a little over a century earlier. The Eiffel Tower was the work of engineering master Gustave Eiffel, who believed that stone as a building medium had gone as far as it could. So he worked with iron to erect a new kind of Gothic spire for the industrial age. But its original purpose wasn’t to enhance Parisians’ relationship with a higher power — unless that higher power was scientific progress. Its main objective was to be … objectified; a sublime example of the stand-alone artistic beauty of French engineering.
Modern illumination technology, however, has given the tower an illustrious function: it’s a literal beacon for the City of Light. To watch the Iron Lady twinkle after sunset, as she does for five minutes on the hour every hour, is to feel like a child once more, watching their first fireworks display. I first went up the tower when I was five. I remember my father pointing to fairy lights strung up in the shape of a Christmas tree, for it was late December. It was my earliest lesson in looking up. But after a certain age, and several more trips to Paris, I stopped adding the Eiffel Tower to my itinerary. It felt too done, too touristy — too cheapened by all the pint-sized plastic replicas you could buy everywhere. Then I had kids of my own and found myself back there, passing on an heirloom of memory. And I realised that you can never grow out of the wonder that this iron marvel inspires.
Security measures mean you can no longer wander through on a whim, and stare up, wide-eyed, from below. You have to suffer all sorts of online-ordering and bag-checking and queue-enduring ordeals to get there now. But it’s worth the effort. To stand directly beneath the 300-metre iron tower, its feet each marking a cardinal point of the compass, is to begin to sense its mathematical brilliance. Riding the lifts, through the criss-cross of the trusses and girders and lattice, is to admire how artisanal it all looks up close, despite the mass of metal, currently painted a shade of greige — how light and lacy, like the filigree frame of an elongated Belle Époque crinoline. And to scrutinise the details is to appreciate how daintily the rivets have been dotted all over, hand-hammered, all 2.5 million of them. The elegance of the tower’s precision is a study in abstract perfection.
La Tour Eiffel hasn’t always been so beloved. Certain critics of the late nineteenth century scorned it as a factory chimney or oversized lamppost. Author Guy de Maupassant, who called it ‘an ever-present and racking nightmare’ used to dine here daily, because it was the only place in Paris where he couldn’t see the dreaded edifice. These days, of course, you pay good money for lunch with a view of the tower, but there’s much pleasure to be had in eating here, too. Consider Restaurant 58 on the first floor, which serves up swank picnic fare in metal baskets that echo the ironwork around you. It’s an ideal vantage point from which to admire the architecture, as much as the view across to the Palais de Chaillot.
For a literal take on haute cuisine, you could splurge at Le Jules Verne on the second floor, the acclaimed restaurant named after the adventure novelist. A contemporary of Gustave Eiffel, Monsieur Verne tapped into his times’ fascination with flight with his breakthrough Cinq Semaines en Ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). But scientific progress was making a future afloat seem less like fiction; Eiffel proved, despite the many naysayers, how far humankind could still advance. His creation took Parisians higher than they’d ever been, shooting moonwards as though in a Jules Verne novel. Unless you’re lingering over a long lunch at the author’s namesake eatery (the prices are suitably high, but so too is the quality), you should continue right on up to the top, because while the Eiffel Tower was initially a structure that aimed for the sky, it was ultimately one that made people look down to earth and see their city, and world, anew.
Eiffel himself lived up here for a while, in what was surely the world’s first penthouse apartment. You can peer into a recreation, complete with floral carpet, wallpaper and waxworks of the engineer and his daughter hosting Thomas Edison. It was up here that Eiffel also worked; no doubt inspired that the sky was no limit, he conducted hundreds of wind experiments that would go on to enhance aeroplane wing and propeller design. He also had some inkling that his tower would prove useful in radio and wireless technology. Sure enough, when the telegraphy unit he’d placed up top captured crucial German intelligence during World War I, the future of the Eiffel Tower was secure. Originally built as a gateway to the 1889 World Expo, the tower would, Eiffel hoped, serve as a ‘triumphal arch as striking as those which earlier generations have raised to honour conquerors.’ The Arc de Triomphe is, of course, striking (and offers a unique celestial view of Paris, with its étoile, or star, of streets radiating around), but ultimately triumphal arches were a door to nowhere. Eiffel’s triumph was in building a monument that would take Parisians upwards and forwards, into the future. For the first time, they could see their world in scale, and their place in it, and life must have suddenly seemed so much more in their grasp.
In these days of ever-taller skyscrapers, there’s still something magical about riding to the top of this tower. There’s a champagne bar up here to enhance the enchantment, and as you sip from your flute, looking onto the city’s metallic domes and roofs glinting in the sunshine, the city seems laid out like a treasure map you can roll up and tuck under your arm. Paris seems suddenly a little more yours.
When you’ve come back to earth, even if only literally, take the Batobus along the Seine to Notre-Dame, which was the city’s most powerful looming presence before Monsieur Eiffel came along. If you’ve never ascended the ancient stone stairs of the cathedral’s towers, consider giving this a whirl — although you won’t see all that much of the island’s Old Paris, as it was obliterated by Baron Haussmann. You’ll get a better glimpse into the city’s medieval past at — ironically —Paris’s contemporary art museum, the Centre Pompidou. To get there, walk north along Rue de la Cité and over Pont Notre-Dame. In a couple of blocks you’ll see, on your left, the Tour Saint-Jacques, all that’s left of a church destroyed during the Revolution, when Parisians rejected Catholicism’s control of air space — they wanted to think big and reach for the skies themselves.
Continue north along Rue Saint-Martin and in about five minutes you’ll find yourself gasping with astonishment in front of Pompidou, arguably Paris’s most radical building. Like the Eiffel Tower before it, Pompidou, which dates from 1977, caused controversy from the start. As to whether the museum has aged as gracefully as the Iron Lady, opinions diverge. Pompidou’s architects had aimed to match a provocative form to irreverent function. The result: a cuboid steel framework, clinging to which is a series of multi-coloured ducts and pipes, which would perhaps look more at home on an oil refinery. Previously, Parisian museums we
re executed in classic stone, in respect for the timeless art within. In this city of discreet architecture, echoing the guarded nature of the residents themselves, stone façades also kept things covered up. Eiffel partly thumbed his nose at this architectural conservatism by building with iron, previously only considered an internal material; but the designers of Pompidou went so much further, turning the template of traditional architecture almost literally inside out. And this on top of razing a whole swathe of one of the most historic parts of medieval Paris.
Criticism aside, Pompidou is a resounding success, attracting some 3.5 million visitors per year (about half the number of the Eiffel Tower, which is nothing shabby). If you’re into modern art, you’ll want to take your time on each floor. If not, go simply for the view. Ride up the people-movers in the outer Plexiglass tubes, and you come close to a vantage point that balloonists might have enjoyed all those years ago. As you scan the higgledy-piggledy rooftops, jutting with chimneys, you see that this city is not just about façades, but also about carefully preserved existences. You see the top levels of buildings, the roofs that house an extra one or two levels, and you get an idea of the lives encased within. You can almost reach out and touch the windows, push aside the lace curtains and peer into the worlds within. The scale is relatable and human, and you can well imagine a time when Parisians lived smaller lives.
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