Having now had the good fortune to have lived in Paris for three months and explored its many hidden corners, I thought I’d share some of the lesser-known delights with you. Places you might not have heard of or had the time to squeeze in if you have visited Paris before. My top six secret treasures of Paris then, next time you are there:
First, some green space. The Promenade Plantée (planted promenade) was created more than twenty years ago now, and is a garden path that meanders way above your head atop a viaduct where a railwayused to pass. Often only five metres wide, its length is covered by boardwalks, brick or stone paths, landscaped with trees and sculptural grasses, sprinkled with benches to sit on and with water pools, rose trellises and the occasional burst of coloured blooms. Couples walk along it on Sunday afternoons, children ride their tiny bikes or are pushed in prams, and little old ladies sit down in a shady spot, reading their books and relaxing on a hot day.
The path goes for about a kilometre above ground before dropping to ground level along a narrow bridge, where it meets a park where people sunbake in the sun. After this it continues on for more than three more kilometres at ground level, wandering through a cool tunnel lined with rocks and scrawled chalk on part of its blackboard interior, then forks past almost tropical vegetation, where one path is for bikes and the other for pedestrians. It’s a pleasure to walk, and takes you all the way to the south-east periphery of central Paris. The idea was replicated in New York’s High Line in 2009. What a great idea to have a garden in the sky.
Second, another green space, also narrow, but this is one where much of the green is water reflecting overhanging trees. It is the Canal Saint-Martin. Take a map of Paris and look for the Canal branching off the Seine along the right-hand side. It’s obvious, yet many people don’t know about it, and even many Parisians don’t know that you can take a boat cruise along it, starting at Bastille, flowing underground for two whole kilometres below gardens and table-tennis tables before emerging above ground, traversing lochs as the Canal continues on its way.
In the days of slow traffic along the Seine, the Canal was used as a short-cut for boats carrying merchandise. These days there are only pleasure boats enjoying the ride along the green stretch, shaded by plane trees. Along its banks, families with strollers walk beside it, and there are picnickers dotted along the way, their legs dangling over the edge until they are almost touching the water.
The Canal is sandwiched between narrow roads, but on Sundays, no cars are allowed. It is then that the bicycles take over the road as well as the cycle lane, especially the ‘vélib’ bikes that you can rent for hardly anything for a day, and for nothing after paying an annual subscription if your journey is less than half an hour. This is a fun way to see the Canal, and I love the sturdy bikes. They are smooth and brown as river stones, and are perfectly designed to entice people to take a ride: their lights go on automatically at night, they are all equipped with handy baskets and have gears and strong frames that cover the back wheel, protecting clothes from mud on a wet day. They click in to their stations, scattered every 300m in the city, so there is no messing around with locks and keys. The bikes are a well-thought out design, complementing a well-planned system that encourages people to use vélib’ for short trips of less than half an hour. As central Paris is so compact, this encourages people to use the metro only for longer distances, promoting exercise. With the cafés and shops scattered along its length, small, designer boutiques hidden almost within sight, and a down-to-earth, multicultural, working population, the Canal is a relaxing, bohemian place to be. I should perhaps acknowledge a bias for this area. We lived in an apartment here.
Third, the Catacombs. Made famous by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, they are another underground road system of Paris, and in the late 18th century were used to store the bones from overflowing cemeteries around Paris, mostly unidentified, and those of some of the victims or perpetrators of Paris’s revolutions. The tunnels were dug to link quarries to each other in the days when this area was outside the city of Paris. They are an impressively comprehensive network. Equally impressive though are the bodies resting down there, twenty metres below the ground. They are not buried, but stacked, like the death camps at Auschwitz: femurs with femurs, tibias with tibias, sculls with sculls. Millions of people who were once alive now form horizontal and vertical patterns as far as the eye can see. The catacombs are punctuated with plaques reminding us of the impermanence of life, and the designs break out in places to form cylindrical structures where the bones are like the rooms in a giant bees’ nest; or porticos, with bones forming their frames.
It’s a confronting experience, following the steady flow of people along the endless corridors, listening to the ‘drip, drip’ of water collecting in pools on the ground. There are attendants down there, making sure that the photos you take are without flash and checking your bag as you emerge above ground. Checking for what? For bones, removed as souvenirs. There are some on the table when we reach the last attendant. They look out of place in the bare room.
My fourth choice is the Paris Mosque – La Grande Mosquée de Paris. With its cool water fountains, blue and green tiles, moorish architecture, white walls and garden, it is a refuge from the noise and bustle of the outside world.
A piece of Morocco in Paris, paying homage to Paris’s multicultural life. Only muslims can enter the prayer hall, but anyone can pay the small entry fee to see the rest of the mosque. And it has a fig-tree centred, mosaic-plastered white courtyard, tempting you with middle-eastern cakes and mint tea just outside its walls.
My fifth choice is the dazzling Sainte-Chapelle, hidden within the Palais de Justice (Law Courts). It is of historical significance because it contains Paris’ oldest stained glass, built in the thirteenth century. However the chapel is remarkable not only for this reason, but also for its beauty, and once you have passed the security check and entrance queues and climbed up the staircase from the church’s entrance, you will marvel at the glittering coloured glass covering the church walls around you and high up above.
Like Chartres Cathedral, the windows tell stories from the Bible that people in the thirteenth century would read like a book, from bottom to top. Also like Chartres, this church was built to house relics: in this case, Louis IX’s personal collection now housed in the treasury at Notre Dame just down the road. You can read the information plates explaining the stories, or you can just sit and take in the dancing light. The seven hundred year old church is a gem, well worth seeking out.
And lastly, a museum, the Decorative Arts Museum (Musée des Arts Décoratifs), actually part of the Louvre Museum but with a separate entrance and ticketing. It is huge, and comprises a museum of posters and one of fashion, both of which display only a small proportion of their collections in their themed exhibitions. The poster museum could be a New York warehouse interior and has been peeled back and dimly lit to expose wood and the walls’ layers of paint inside, giving a suitably raw feel. I saw an exhibition about Toulouse Lautrec here, complemented by an exhibition of a hundred artists who created posters to commemorate him. In the fashion museum I saw dozens of dresses by Madeleine Vionnet,who created classic after original classic covering her forty-odd working career.
Near the fashion is the jewellery section, displayed arrestingly in dark, black rooms and proceeding chronologically, from the tiny sculptured biblical scenes in a round nut not much larger than my thumb, just like I had seen in the Louvre itself, to exquisite Lalique jewellery from Art Déco times. Not Euro-centric, there are also cases displaying work from China, India and Japan, as well as gold pieces from ancient civilisations.
There is a toy museum to amuse children and provide food for adult reminiscences, but the largest section of the museum are the decorative arts floors, which display religious art, paintings and everyday objects from before the Middle Ages up until the present day. I loved this journey, looking at finely sculpted chairs, tables, picnic sets and hair brushes. You caught glimpses of what life might have been like for a seventeenth century person in a wheelchair who could even extend their legs out in something like a modern armchair.
Up in the early twentieth century section, a bedroom, entrance hall and bathroom were moved from their original location to delight the visitor: they are opulent and rich blue, the elegant furniture perfectly integrated into the design. And the last few decades are housed in the tower of the building, attic-like. In one, after being shown a spiral of chairs designed from the sixties to the seventies, some chairs to be sat on are scattered across a room: a swingling sphere, suspended from the ceiling; little mushroom-like stools; and a chair you lie back on, resting your legs on an enormous ball in matching fabric. You can sit there and watch clips from movies in which these chairs are featured, and admire the view of the Tuileries and the rest of Paris stretching below.
These are my favourite secret places of Paris. I hope that if you have not explored them yet, you will seek them out one day. As for me, I have a journey of another sort to describe to you next time.
Summary top six roads less travelled:
1. Promenade plantée – 12th arrondissement
2. Canal Saint-Martin – 10th
3. Les Catacombes – 14th
4. La Mosquée de Paris – 5th
5. Sainte Chapelle – 1st
6. Musée des Arts Decoratifs – 1st
