Marais on foot, Saturday morning

I have written about the Marais perhaps too often. It is the part of Paris that most rewards walking, partly because it is small enough to walk through in three hours, partly because the streets are still narrow and unrenovated, and partly because the cafés along the way are exactly what you imagine when you imagine Paris cafés. The risk is that the Marais has become its own caricature — there are streets that exist primarily to be photographed by people who will then never return.

I walked it on a Saturday in late December, starting at the place des Vosges before the gates of the small park had opened, and finishing three hours later at a boulangerie on the rue de Bretagne whose window display has not, by my count, changed since at least 2019. The Saturday morning matters: by eleven the streets are full, and the Marais becomes another city.

From the place des Vosges to the rue Vieille-du-Temple

The place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris, and at eight in the morning in December it is empty. The arcades on the four sides — under which the bookshops and the small antique dealers operate — are closed but visible through their windows. I walked the perimeter twice, slowly. The square is the kind of place that rewards repetition: the same architecture, in two different lights, becomes two different places.

From the south-west corner of the square I walked along the rue de Birague to the rue Saint-Antoine, then west to the rue Vieille-du-Temple, which is the spine of the western Marais. The street is short enough to walk in twenty minutes, but it contains, at last count, two of the better antique shops in the city, three of the worst tourist boutiques, and one of the most patient booksellers I have met.

The Marais is best at eight in the morning, when the cafés are setting up and nobody has yet decided what kind of day to have.

The northern half

The northern half of the Marais — north of the rue des Francs-Bourgeois — is the part that has changed least in the last decade. The streets are narrower, the shops are older, and the cafés do not have English menus. The rue des Archives, at its northern end, is where the long-established Jewish quarter begins, and the bakeries there have been there for thirty or forty years and are unchanged.

I stopped on the rue de Bretagne, at a small market that operates every morning except Monday, and bought a single pear. The vendor wrapped it in a piece of newspaper and refused to take any money for it because, he said, I had not bought enough. This is the kind of transaction that you cannot have in a renovated neighbourhood. You can only have it where the same vendor has been at the same stall for thirty-five years and has decided, on his own account, what counts as a real customer.

How to walk the Marais

• Start early. Eight in the morning. Earlier if possible.
• Walk every street twice — once in each direction. You will see different things each time.
• Buy something. The shops are why these streets still exist; they will not continue to exist if everyone only photographs them.
• Do not book a tour. There are perfectly good tours of the Marais and you will see more on your own.