Only in Paris by Duncan J.D. Smith

9 Introduction Introduction “Paris est un véritable océan. Jetez-y la sonde, vous n’en connaîtrez jamais la profondeur.” (Paris is truly an ocean. Cast the sounding-line, but you will never fathom its depth.) Le Père Goriot , Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)* Straddling the River Seine, Paris, La Ville-Lumière , is one of the world’s most visited cities. It is also one of the most written about. Romantic, revolutionary, and achingly beautiful, it contains myriad places to dis- cover. It is good to know that the famous sights, reflecting the city’s 2,000-year-long history, still retain a few secrets. Away from the tour- ist hotspots, however, there are many less well-known locations, each providing a hidden history of the place. Devotees of the city will agree with the novelist Balzac: the deeper one delves, the more Paris unfurls like the petals of a rose. This book has been written for the explorer, the Flâneur , and for all those who wish to discover Paris anew. A few minutes of plan- ning and a glance at a street map** will get the reader quickly off the beaten track, where they can experience a different city. This is the Paris of ancient ruins and underground worlds, of eccentric museums and idiosyncratic shops, of hidden communities and unusual places of worship. Some of these journeys are self-contained itineraries, the result of the author’s urban odysseys through the city’s 20 Arrondissements Mu- nicipaux , which unwind clockwise inside the Périphérique . Others act merely as an entrée to broader themes, starting points from where the reader can embark on their own voyages of discovery. It was the poet Baudelaire who opined that old Paris was no more, and that a town changes more swiftly than the human heart. Whilst this may be true it is hoped that the locations described in the following pages will en- able the reader to reacquaint themselves with the old Paris, whilst also encouraging them to sample the delights of the new. Many of the locations are to be found in the city centre either side of the Seine (Arrondissements 1–7) . Encompassing both the Marais on the Rive Droite and the Quartier Latin on the Rive Gauche , these are the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, as well as its geographical centre. A similar number, however, lie outside these areas, in both the leafy bourgeois northwest (Arr. 8 & 9, 16–18) (notably in Montmartre) and