LES QUARTIERS DE PARIS

DAY 1 HISTORIC CENTRE

High-rise Gothic masterpieces, Neoclassical monoliths and snug bistros dominate the beating heart of the city

Entering Sainte-Chapelle feels like climbing into a kaleidoscope. From all directions, light pours in through the 15-metre-high stained-glass windows in glorious technicolor. The floor, too, is a riot of red, green and blue, and 12 largerthan-life apostles glare down from the gilded pillars. Often overlooked in favour of Notre Dame, this 13th-century chapel is a good starting point for a stroll through Paris’s history.

Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie both stand on the Île de la Cité, the island where Paris first began, and together they make up the remains of France’s oldest palace. It was in the Conciergerie that Marie Antoinette was imprisoned.

Following the path her cart took as it trundled towards the guillotine leads through the Louvre, past queues snaking into its glass pyramid, and into the Renaissance orderliness of the Jardin des Tuileries. On her lunch break, with a colleague from the Ministry of Education, Véra Massias is strolling along the garden’s wide avenues, past the faultlessly symmetrical lawns and hedges. ‘I never get blasé about this,’ she says. ‘Here you really get a sense of the history and romance of the city.’

A short detour away from the Tuileries, other office workers are sharing a bottle of red in Juveniles, a burgundy-walled bistro where the baby-faced chef, Romain Roudeau, serves dishes ‘like his grandfather used to make’. As the sweet smell of caramelising balsamic and garlic diffuses across the room, customers pause conversations with anticipatory glances at the open kitchen.

Back at the Tuileries, sunlight floods through the enormous conservatory of the Musée de l’Orangerie. Inside, a couple holding hands lose themselves in Monet’s Water Lilies. His 12-metre-long canvases wrap round the walls, enveloping the viewer in an entrancing widescreen vision. ‘These were his last works. He wanted them displayed here and gave them to the people of France,’ a curator explains. ‘It was his last testament.’

Just beyond the Tuileries is where Marie Antoinette met her end – the present-day Place de la Concorde. Instead of a guillotine, this traffic-encircled square today holds at its centre a 3,300-year-old obelisk from Egypt. From here, the mother of all vistas

Gothic Sainte-Chapelle’s stainedglass windows depict scenes from the Old and New Testament. LEFT The Tour de l’Horloge clockface on the Conciergerie

DAY 2 LEFT BANK

Cafés for philosophising, collectablebook stalls and serene galleries in this realm of artists, writers and thinkers

Bouquinistes (booksellers) line the banks of the Seine. LEFT The smaller of two bars at La Palette. RIGHT Paris student Michael Wolf

insider tip

FOR SOME PEACE AND QUIET, HEAD TO MUSÉE ZADKINE’S PRETTY GARDEN

Paris’s intellectual centre of gravity has long been the Left Bank. Today the area’s expensive apartments no longer house students and struggling creatives, but the many universities and publishing houses mean they still crowd the streets and cafés.

La Palette, a café frequented by Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Jim Morrison, remains in a bohemian time warp. Art Deco murals share the walls with smoke-stained mirrors. A waiter in a black waistcoat sweeps out of the kitchen with a tray bearing a croissant. He places it in front of a professoriallooking man on the terrace, who pauses his breakfast ritual to nod a quick bonjour to a passer-by he recognises.

‘The café culture here is special,’ says Michael Wolf, a student originally from Berlin, who’s lived in Paris for three years. ‘I appreciate the long meals, the chance to watch people go by. You have this interesting mix between international students from all the universities and the old Parisian families that live here.’

Equally good for people-watching are the quayside bouquinistes, where used books have been sold since the 16th century. Many of the bottle-green quayside stalls now deal mainly in mini Eiffel Towers, but a dedicated few, especially those grouped on Quai Malaquais, continue to hawk the written word. A teenager flits between yellowed Charlie Hebdo magazines and 1950s Disney comics. Meanwhile, a bearded vendor relinquishes a play by Racine, France’s Shakespeare, to a man wearing a lemonyellow scarf, for a few euros.

It costs a lot more to buy the rare editions sold around Saint-Germain. Here leather-bound tomes are exhibited in shop windows like museum pieces. At one of these antique bookstores, Librairie Camille Sourget, an assistant carefully places a volume by the Roman historian Tacitus next to a letter signed by the 19th-century French novelist Émile Zola.

With just as much precision, a red- bow-tied waiter is arranging cutlery on the marble tables at the nearby restaurant Germain. Another server dashes past with a bowl of cascading French fries. The service here is traditional but the décor is anything but: flashes of neon colour are everywhere and the legs of a giant, bright-yellow statue appear to have crashed through the ceiling.

Paris has always drawn artists who liked making statements. Just south of SaintGermain, Montparnasse is where the likes of Picasso first flung Modernism in the faces of the art establishment. On the border of Montparnasse, at Musée Zadkine,

DAY 3 BASTILLE & LE MARAIS

Artisan craftsmen, eccentric boutiques and croissants, cheese and chocolate to die for amongst winding medieval lanes

Apple tarts at Blé Sucré. LEFT Fabrice Le Bourdat presents his giant ‘to-share’ madeleines Fabrice, a former pastry chef at five-star hotel Le Bristol, behind his counter at Blé Sucré

insider tip

GET TO BLÉ SUCRÉ EARLY FOR ITS AWARD-WINNING MADELEINES

Pride in locally grown, from-scratch produce isn’t some hipster fad in Paris – it’s a culinary tradition. In the workingclass Bastille district, just as clubbers are stumbling to bed, Fabrice Le Bourdat forces himself awake each day at 2.30am, to bake at the Blé Sucré boulangerie. His madeleines were named the best in Paris by newspaper Le Figaro, but this morning, customers have come for the croissants. Their warm buttery scent hangs tantalisingly outside the shop.

Down the road, a stroll around the Marché d’Aligre covered food market becomes an olfactory safari. Moving from stall to stall, the zingy aroma of olive tapenade is replaced by roasted chicken with thyme, then fresh flowers, warm dough, and a punch to the nose from Fromagerie Langlet-Hardouin. Monsieur Hardouin’s hundred-odd varieties of cheese, from plum-sized chèvre to enormous holey Swiss Emmental, draw a crowd. Old men and women, pulling shopping bags on wheels, jostle for Monsieur Hardouin’s attention.

From artisanal food to handmade crafts, it’s a short hop on Paris’s easy- to-rent Vélib’ bikes to the Viaduc des Arts, where the arches under a disused railway have been converted into modern, glassfronted workshops. Through the window of Atelier Stéphane Guilbaud, Martin Renucci can be seen working on a set of prints. An unlit cigarette hangs from his mouth; behind him stands a gargantuan lithograph printing press dating back to 1900. ‘Lots of countries got rid of them, but France kept these machines,’ says Martin. ‘It used to print newspapers. Now we’re working with artists from all over the world.’

Continuing by bike, it’s a quick ride to the Place des Vosges in Le Marais – an ideal picnic spot for bread, cheese and cold cuts bought earlier at Blé Sucré and Marché d’Aligre. Across this landscaped square, La Vie en Rose plays out on a saxophone, accompanied by tweeting birds.

While much of Paris is intersected with grand avenues and boulevards built in the 19th century, Le Marais is still a maze of narrow medieval lanes, now populated with galleries and upmarket boutiques. Round the corner from Place des Vosges, concept store L’êtreANGE appears like a naturalist’s study: plants dangle from the ceiling, cups are kept under bell jars and anthropomorphic prints hang next to a deer bust wearing a bow-tie.

In the Haut Marais, as the end furthest from the river is known, exquisite specimens of another kind are on

DAY 4 THE NORTHEAST

Head away from the busy centre to a district of Belle Époque cottages, political wall art and hidden, cutting-edge eateries

Cottages on Villa de la Renaissance, off Rue de l’Egalité. RIGHT Faux balconies on Rue de Mouzaïa, nearby Rue de la Liberté

If the storybook Paris depicted in the whimsical film Amélie actually exists, it’s not to be found in Montmartre, with its gauntlet of hawkers. Instead, for authentic Parisian village life, take the subway to Danube. Around a trio of streets, Rue de la Liberté, Rue de l’Egalité and Rue de la Fraternité, a crisscross of pedestrianised alleys, with names beginning with ‘Villa’, are lined with Belle Époque cottages. Wandering here, it’s all pastel walls, potted plants and Art Nouveau ironwork.

Following the trail of these quiet roads leads to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, where a father races his son up a set of stairs. It’s worth the steep climb to the Corinthian temple folly at the top of the park. From here, Sacré-Coeur’s white domes gleam in the distance and, immediately below, park life unfolds on an ant-like scale. Prams and bicycles wheel round paths, while sunbathers stretch out on vertiginous grass banks, like Seurat’s famous painting of bathers by the Seine.

A short ride on the 75 bus reveals an altogether different scene in the area east of Canal Saint-Martin. The word ‘Liberté’ is doused on a wall on Rue Jacques LouvelTessier. Doves, painted in orange and red, fly above the giant letters and, in a space inside the letter ‘B’, someone has written ‘Je suis Charlie. Libre’ (I am Charlie. Free).

In this gentrifying area, street art, graffiti tags and workers’ cafés now neighbour gluten-free bakeries and stylish international restaurants. Outside Le Petit Cambodge, a duo capped in trilbies wait for a friend; inside this Cambodian canteen, benches of customers wolf down delicate rice noodles laced with prawns, chillies, peanuts and lemongrass.

Nearby, a barely noticeable sign marks

the entrance to Le Comptoir Général, a self-styled ‘temple to ghetto culture’. A red-carpeted hallway opens into a sprawling space with vintage clothes and record stalls, and a bar manned by a man with a ’fro and Homer Simpson T-shirt. Working the rooms is a Senegalese musician, who strums a kora (lute), soliciting laughs with risqué wordplay. ‘This is a unique cultural space centred around French Africa,’ explains regular visitor Stéphane Ranaivoson, a Parisian with Madagascan roots, who’s come today with his friend Alexie. ‘This is the real Paris,’ he says, ‘not the Eiffel Tower.’

Crossing one of Canal Saint-Martin’s footbridges leads to another, once seedy, now evolving neighbourhood. The area around Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est is experiencing a gastro revolution, and at the forefront is 52 Faubourg Saint-Denis,

Essentials

GETTING THERE Eurostar operates up to 16 trains a day from London St Pancras International to Paris (from £69 return; eurostar. com). Air France, BA, CityJet, easyJet, Flybe, Jet2.com and Ryanair fly from numerous UK cities (from £70; ryanair.com).

GETTING AROUND For short distances, Paris’s public bike-hire scheme Vélib’ (velib.paris) is a convenient way to get around. Bikes can be picked up and dropped off at any of the 1,800 stations across the city. Buy a one-day pass (£1.20) at the stations themselves – journeys under 30 minutes are free. Download the free Vélib’ app to find your nearest stops, with real-time figures of how many bikes are available. Buses, Metro and RER trains provide extensive coverage of the city. Singles cost £1.30, while a carnet (book of 10 singles; £9.80) may work out cheaper than a one-day unlimited travel Mobilis pass (£5.50), depending on how many trips you’re planning on taking in a day.

Taxis are hard to find during rush hour, but are reasonably priced over short distances (minimum fare £4.90).

Make it Happen

FURTHER READING See Lonely Planet’s Make My Day: Paris (£5.99) or, for a more in-depth guide, try Paris (£13.99), and official guide parisinfo.com.

Paris’s summer social calendar

HISTORIC CENTRE 21–24 May Eat your way around the food stalls and cooking demos that take over the Grand Palais during Taste of Paris (paris.tastefestivals.com). 20 July–18 August Play pétanque and volleyball, or just sunbathe in a deckchair, on the pop-up beaches that line the Right Bank during Paris Plage season (paris.fr/parisplages). LEFT BANK Early July Sing along during Cinema Karaoke – an open-air screening on the Left Bank that is one of the highlights of the Paris Cinema Festival (pariscinema.org). 13 July–14 August Quartier d’Été brings diverse genres of theatre, circus and contemporary dance to venues across the city, including the Jardin du Luxembourg (quartierdete.com). BASTILLE & LE MARAIS 27 June The Marche des Fiertés (aka Pride) parade usually finishes with a huge dance party in Place de la République, spilling into Le Marais (marche.inter-lgbt.org). 6–10 July Over a week the Place de la République becomes an open-air concert hall with free gigs put on for the Soirs d’Été – past performers include the Klaxons (soirsdete.fr). NORTHEAST 21 June Free gigs take place in bars, concert halls and parks all over the city for the Fête de la Musique. Head to Parc ButtesChaumont for a house/funk DJ set (fetedelamusique.culture.fr). Late July–late August See films screened outdoors for free during Cinema en Plein Air in the futuristic Parc Villette, near Canal Saint-Martin (lavillette.com).

ACCOMMODATION OPTIONS

HISTORIC CENTRE: HOTEL CRAYON A surprisingly affordable option in an area best known for expensive heritage accommodation, this hotel is just a five-minute walk from the Louvre. Its 27 rooms are all individually styled with bold splashes of colour and artist sketches that are just the right side of eccentric (from £80; hotelcrayon.com).

LEFT BANK: HÔTEL D’ANGLETERRE This hotel in central Saint- Germain was formerly a British embassy, and was later where Ernest Hemingway and his wife spent their first night in Paris. Some of the rooms have wooden beams and four-poster beds (from £140; hotel-dangleterre.com). NORTH EAST: HÔTEL DU TEMPS A 10-minute walk from the hip Gare de l’Est quarter, this vintagestyle hotel mixes exposed wooden beams and rattan panelling with block-print fabrics (from £115; hotel-du-temps.fr).

BASTILLE & LE MARAIS: HOTEL JULES & JIM This arty hotel in Le Marais references François Truffaut’s iconic film. Edgy designs extend to the rooms, roof terrace, retro bar and courtyard, featuring a vertical garden and log fire (from £150; hoteljulesetjim.com).