IF THE REMAINING few passages in Paris are said to be predecessors of our shopping malls of today, we have much to be thankful for in that there are at least some left, but much to lament in that their modern versions are such poor imitations.
I find it fascinating to visit these old passages, beautiful shopping arcades built of iron and glass in the mid-1800s. Each one has its own character—no two are alike—and I’ve found some of the contemporary shops in them to be among the most enticing in Paris. (Visitors may also recognize the passage known as the Galerie Vivienne from Luis Buñuel’s film That Obscure Object of Desire.) Try to include a walk through at least one passage as you explore Paris—we really do not have the architectural equivalent in North America. Some of the places mentioned in this article may no longer exist; as always, if you have your heart set on visiting a particular restaurant or shop, check ahead of time that it is still open.
CATHARINE REYNOLDS, introduced previously, went to live in Paris as a student in 1964 and has lived and traveled there off and on ever since. This piece appeared in the January 1988 issue of Gourmet.
“WINTER WILL COME, and then Paris is the devil,” lamented the Irish poet Thomas Moore in 1820. His moan remains relevant: last winter brought ample evidence of just how filthy January weather in Paris could get—it took the army, equipped with trench spades, to dig the city out of the snow. Yet for visitors and residents all is not forlorn if the weather turns nasty. No need to lock oneself in, deprived of the city’s pleasures. Clearly Moore didn’t, for he went on to write:
Where shall I begin with the endless delights
Of this Eden of milliners, monkies and sights—
This dear busy place, where there’s nothing transacting
But dressing and dinnering, dancing and acting?
Together with affluent Parisians of his time, Moore would have taken refuge from the weather in the passages that were lacing together Restoration Paris. The Petit Larousse tells us that a passage is “a covered walkway where only pedestrians go,” a definition that disregards the narrow boutiques that have traditionally lined the passages of Paris and excludes the glazed roofs that were and are essential to the enchantment of Paris’s passages.
Paris is hardly alone in possessing such glassed-in commercial walkways. Milan and Naples have their gallerie, London has its arcades, Brussels has its galeries; so do Leningrad and Moscow. All are the ancestors of our modern shopping malls, but Paris’s nineteenth-century passages possess bags more charm.
The origins of the passages are not clear. The commercial success of Philippe-Égalité’s late-eighteenth-century wooden arcades in the Palais Royal no doubt attracted the attention of speculators. Inspiration may have come from descriptions of Oriental bazaars by veterans returning from Napoléon’s Egyptian campaign. Demand coincided with technology, for engineers had perfected systems that permitted economical overhead glazing of large, long areas.
The money-spinning appeals of the passages were obvious: post-Napoleonic France was reveling in the fruits of her belated industrial revolution. Her citizens were all too delighted to be able to spend their money in the dry warmth of the passages, sheltered from the hurly-burly of unwieldy carriages, fractious horses, and earthy odors. Developers were not slow to see the opportunities; between the battles of Waterloo and Sedan passages mushroomed in the area from the Palais Royal north to the Grands Boulevards.
In their heyday the passages were places to see and to be seen. Most were located near coach transport depots and theaters. Mondaines hastened there to visit their glovemakers, engravers, milliners, and jewelers, and then to gush over their prizes at the nearby cafés and restaurants. As time went on the attractions were multiplied with the growth of the entertainments of the Boulevards. As John Russell says so aptly, “A hundred years ago … the Grands Boulevards were Cosmopolis itself,” and the passages functioned as a vital element in that sophistication. Where else were the boulevardier’s wife and mistress to buy their fripperies?
Then came the nearly fatal hiatus. In the intervening century the epicenter of the city moved west, and trains altered the transport habits of the capital, leaving the Boulevards to molder—often not very genteelly. Baron Haussmann mercilessly cut streets through some of the finest passages, like the Passage de l’Opéra. Fashionable Third Republicans deserted the small, specialized shops of the passages for the grands magasins.
Of the 137 passages enumerated by the Véritable conducteur parisien of 1828, only about twenty worthy of the name remain. Until just a few years ago even the handsomest of those were tenanted chiefly by sex shops, cut-rate clothes outlets, unpedigreed stamp dealers and numismatists, pedicurists, cobblers, printers, and a handful of old-fashioned deluxe commerçants, who were bravely determined to rise above the rainwater spilling through the broken panes of the skylights that had once been the glory of these very passages.
All that is changing. Demand for central Paris real estate has made it increasingly attractive to restore and refurbish many of the city’s nineteenth-century passages. Fueled by the prosperity of Paris’s born-again Bourse, renovation is rife, and the passages nearest the stock exchange have been the first to benefit. What with this pressure on central Paris real estate values, many of the city’s nineteenth-century passages are undergoing a resurrection—which is a boon to the nostalgic; the curious; students of urbanism; admirers of nineteenth-century cast-iron architecture; chronic lèche-vitrines, that is, those suffering from that most extreme, Gallic form of window shopping; and Parisian and visitor alike caught by winter’s weather. Rain or shine, an expedition, map in hand, through the three kilometers of Paris’s passages (which need not be undertaken of a piece!) offers a seasonable opportunity to see what’s old and new in Paris.
Just to the east of the Palais Royal, running off the tiny rue du Bouloi behind a tree-bedecked square, lies one of the lesser-known passages, the Galerie Véro-Dodat, developed in 1826 by a pair of savvy pork butchers who built opposite the terminus of the Messageries-Générales, the line of horse-drawn carriages that brought provincials to Paris from all of eastern France. Messrs. Véro and Dodat must have been tasteful butchers as well, for the identical mahogany shop fronts, with narrow brass-framed windows outlined with faux marbre columns topped with gilded bronze capitals and cherubs, are a model of grace and sobriety.
A dally along the diagonal black-and-white checkerboard-floored passage overhung with ivies dangling from the second-story window boxes can yield all manner of surprises. The bright, chic hats and trendy sweaters at Jean-Claude Brousseau catch the eye immediately. His is an address treasured by misses in search of a turban or an outrageously oversize velvet beret that will turn the heads of race-goers at Chantilly and Gauloises-puffing Breton fishermen alike. Il Bisonte at the other end of the galerie can provide the same misses with solid Florentine-made handbags and satchels. In between are the specialist antiquaires, dealers like Robert Capia, Paris’s leading expert on antique dolls and the very man to see for those in search of a doll marked Bru, Jumeau, Steiner, or Schmitt. M. Capia is equally pleased to take on repairs or simply to chat about the history of the passage. His neighbors, Alain Fassier, R. and F. Charles, Eric Philippe, and Bernard Gauguin, trade in nineteenth-century rustic furniture, stringed instruments, early-twentieth-century furniture, and books respectively. M. Gauguin has some particularly fine old cookbooks, which are said to attract Alain Senderens, who is forever on the lookout for new dishes for Lucas-Carton. Nor is the passage without its restaurant, Le Véro-Dodat, behind whose lace curtains chef Yannick Ouvrard serves up tempting fare.
A few blocks to the northeast a pair of linked passages runs off the rue des Petits-Champs. The Galerie Vivienne and the Galerie Colbert are perhaps the best-restored and most lively of Paris’s passages. They share neoclassical decors, though in fact the Vivienne was built in 1823, three years before the Colbert. Goddesses and nymphs disport themselves under the Vivienne’s arched roof and around its rotunda, while young models people its length below. They wander across the swirling pastel mosaics from shops like Catherine Vernoux, run by a former casting director with a penchant for colorful geometric knits; to Yuki Torii, a bold Japanese designer who seems to have broken away from the somber palette of most of his countrymen; to Camille Blin, a lady given to shapely jersey dresses and daring jewelry; to Jean-Paul Gaultier, whose clothes an exhibitionist can wear with confidence. The more domestic then tuck into Casa Lopez to ogle its splendid custom-made rugs or Si Tu Veux for a magician’s hat or an old-fashioned wooden pull toy for a godchild. Then they collapse into one of the wicker chairs spread before À Priori Thé, a tea shop started by three Americans, which explains the superiority of the brownies and pecan pie.
The more pensive can stop at the Librairie Petit-Siroux, founded in 1826 and still redolent of the provincial, timeless atmosphere that has long drawn writers to the passages. Surrealist Louis Aragon was a regular there and a great champion of the outright louche and secret aura of the passages, eloquently limning their spell in Le Paysan de Paris. Small wonder that this bookshop does a good business in volumes about Paris.
A door leads into the glittering rotunda of the Galerie Colbert, which has just undergone a total face-lift. The Bibliothèque Nationale owns the Colbert and has installed its comely Musée des Arts du Spectacle and the Musée Charles Cros between the faux marbre columns, along with the winning boutique Colbert, selling well-reproduced postcards and posters drawn from the library’s collection. The museums mount changing exhibits of posters and costumes related to theater, opera, and dance, and a dazzling collection of antique phonographs.
The Passage Choiseul stands five blocks down the rue des Petits-Champs. Restoration is more of an intention than a reality there, yet the Choiseul merits a visit. Betwixt the neon bedizenments, general sleaze, and shops selling unlabeled clothes purported to come from leading manufacturers, one can enjoy the graceful tribune supported on Ionic columns and savor what Paul Verlaine called “les passages Choiseul aux odeurs de jadis …”
This is the most literary of the passages, for here Alphonse Lemerre, the publishing genie of the Parnassiens, had his offices at nos. 27–31 from the 1860s onward. Paul Verlaine, Sully Prudhomme, Leconte de Lisle, and José-Maria de Heredia met in his shop regularly. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, author of Mort à crédit, lived there also. His mother kept a lace shop over which he spent sixteen years inhabiting “three rooms linked by a corkscrew.” The nineteenth-century atmosphere is extended by the captivating office and artists’ suppliers Lavrut, whose oaken drawers overflow with pastels and a bounteous selection of my favorite Clairefontaine notebooks with ultrasmooth paper designed for those who appreciate the pleasures of writing with a fountain pen. Not to break the spell, one can slip into the café au lait box called Pandora to sip some of Paul Corcellet’s ethereally flavored teas, perhaps accompanied by the house’s poppy-seed-studded quiche lorraine and a salad.
The Passage des Princes, running off the rue de Richelieu to the north, was another hangout of the Parnassiens, whose poetry magazine, the Revue fantaisiste, published works of Charles Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, and others. Built in 1860, the elbow-shaped Passage des Princes is the last subsisting Second Empire passage, yet it looks very tired, which seems a terrible pity, especially when one reflects on the glitter its airy, lantern-hung coral arches once knew as the home of Peter’s restaurant. French gastronome Courtine credits the eponymous Pierre Fraysse, who had worked in Chicago, with naming homard à l’américaine, a variation on a lobster preparation of his native Sète, to flatter a table of late-arriving Americans.
Today the Passage des Princes’s most visitable shop is Sommer, a pipe-making concern five years older than the passage itself and long-standing supplier to serious smokers like Georges Simenon. Even the most dedicated antitobacco lobbyist cannot help but admire the workmanship in the antiques for sale or stand fascinated before the craftsmen creating small works of art in the window, using brier and the firm’s specialty, écume de mer, a silicate said to purify the noxious elements in tobacco.
Perhaps the most evocative if not the tidiest of Paris’s passages are the three spanning the boulevard Montmartre, the Passage des Panoramas, the Passage Jouffroy, and the Passage Verdeau. The oldest, the Panoramas, is named for the two giant panoramas that were installed to either side of its entrance by an American speculator named James Thayer. Thayer had purchased the French patent for painted perspectives, or panoramas, from countryman Robert Fulton, who used the proceeds to fund his experiments with steamboats. Meanwhile Thayer developed the passage to cash in on the crowds come to see the sixty-two-foot-high canvases of Paris and Toulon.
And his success was great. The Passage des Panoramas was a center of fashionable shopping right up to the fall of the Second Empire. Modistes vied with stylish cafés. Jean-Marie Farina perfumed the air with his véritable eau de Cologne. Marquis’s chocolate brought top-hatted dandies sprinting. There the antiquaire Susse sold Alexandre Dumas père Eugène Delacroix’s Le Tasse dans la prison des fous for six hundred francs, little suspecting that the wily Dumas would go on to sell it for fifty thousand.
The Passage des Panoramas was extended repeatedly, eventually providing access to the stage door of the Théâtre des Variétés, the theater where Zola’s Nana held men spellbound. Here is Zola’s description of the Panoramas, where poor Comte Muffat waited:
Under the glass panes, white with reflected light, the passage was brilliantly illuminated. A stream of light emanated from white globes, red lanterns, blue transparencies, lines of gas jets, and gigantic watches and fans outlined in flame, all burning in the open; and the splash of window displays, the gold of the jewelers, the crystal jars of the confectioners, the pale silks of the milliners, glittered in the shock of mirrored light behind the plate-glass windows.
However bogus Nana’s art, real talent was encouraged there after 1868, when the Académie Julian was installed in the Passage des Panoramas. The Académie tutored many painters, including Americans Childe Hassam and Charles Dana Gibson.
Today the Passage des Panoramas has more memories than glamour, but it seems to be bootstrapping its way up, led in no small part by Stern, the capital’s grandest graveur, which since 1840 has served a clientele of emperors, grandees, miscellaneous aristocrats, diplomats, and just plain folk with painstakingly engraved bristols (calling cards), bookplates, signet rings, invitations, and letterheads from its ravishing shop paneled with dark oak heavy with caryatids and curlicues.
The neighborhood is mixed. The less said about the Sauna Hamman Euro Men’s Club the better. The food shops are generally fast, though L’Arbre à Cannelle serves an amiable tea amid potted palms; the stamp dealers tout themselves as maisons de confiance, which always leaves me wondering; and the newer shops—like Maknorth, the outlet for a Cambodian designer of the bold school, and Trompe l’Oeil, the place for obelisks and for fruit not intended for eating—are signs that things are looking up.
Across the boulevard Montmartre the Passage Jouffroy, dating from 1845, beckons from beneath the weight of the Hôtel Ronceray. It has an Oriental flavor, thanks to two of its largest shops, the Palais Oriental and La Tour des Délices. The former is ideal if you have to cancel a trip to Marrakech, stocking almost everything to be found in the souks. The latter is full of delectable sweetmeats made of honey and almonds and coconut, which it serves up with mint tea.
France takes over farther down under the skylight with Pain d’Épice, a shop specializing in tiny, shiny toys to fill a stocking as well as the miniature batterie de cuisine and provisions for the larder of a dollhouse Cordon Bleu. Galerie 34 and Abel are treasure houses of parasols, umbrellas, walking sticks, and canes, dating from the seventeenth century to the end of World War II. And I never fail to stop at La Boîte à Joujoux at the bend of the passage opposite the exit of the Musée Grévin to select a fifteen-franc bag of bonbons à l’ail (garlic hard candies) from among the jokes.
The Librairie Vulin operates in a more serious vein, promising “toujours de belles occasions” (always good bargains). The shop’s bins of books line the passage, making Vulin a bouquiniste without the hazards of Seine-side rainstorms. Opposite stands Cinédoc, a mecca for film fanatics questing for posters, postcards, magazines, black-and-white studio stills, and books, including biographies of stars from Bud Abbott to Loretta Young.
Across the rue de la Grange-Batelière the Passage Verdeau entices from between Corinthian columns. Its skylights, divided into small squares, its peeling cream paint, and its stony floor make the passage seem more tenebrous and bleak, but its restaurant and specialist shops assure it a following. Most prominent among the boutiques is Photo Verdeau, the source for rare cameras. Its ample stock of nineteenth-century matériel—objects like stereopticons—is complemented by a selection of silent films starring Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. Cheek by jowl, two good bookstores, the Librairie Farfouille and the Librairie Le Comédien, offer delicious scents to the bookhound. Postcard collectors flock to La France Ancienne. A good postsearch lunch is available at either the Restaurant Martin Malburet (aka Drouot Verdeau) or Les Menus Plaisirs. The first is more ambitious, with its collection of enameled promotional signs spread over two stories. I spied one vaunting Brasseries du Katanga while enjoying the gigotin d’agneau en croûte (lamb in pastry) and the marquise au chocolat extra bitter et moka (dense bitter chocolate and mocha mousse).
Another day I sampled Les Menus Plaisirs, a restaurant name with a double entendre, referring to both the pleasures of the carte and the small pleasures enjoyed by a king when he ruled the land. In the case of this small restaurant the pleasures take the form of such offerings as good salads and pastas with smoked salmon, foie gras, basil, or garlic.
The fate of some of the other passages has been less happy. Some, like the Passage du Caire and the Passage du Havre, have capitulated to the worst excesses of commerce. In the case of the Passage du Caire this is a shame, for it is the oldest extant, with an exceptionally elegant, bright glass skylight. Its entrance on the rue du Caire still bears three stylized retour d’Egypte pharaohs. Unfortunately the wholesale garment district seized the neighborhood, and today the poor passage is hostage to neon-lit tenants who supply display wares, mannequins, and wrapping materials to small shops across France. I have long bought Christmas wrapping paper in hundred-meter rolls there. One need only brave the lack of service in this wholesale world; the shopkeepers always seem pleased enough to deal in cash if one is prepared to purchase in bulk.
The Passage du Havre, located near the Gare Saint-Lazare, is even more honky-tonk, with the three well-stocked boutiques of La Maison du Train its only redeeming features. Little boys of all ages journey there to purchase rolling stock and to obtain spare parts and repairs.
Sadder still are those passages, like the Brady and the Prado, that have been grossly misused and not maintained, their identities swallowed up by neighborhoods grown tacky around them. The Brady was truncated by the cutting of the boulevard de Sébastopol and never really recovered. Today its name is hardly discernible in the broken floor tiles, and holes in the glazing gush rainwater on the merchants of ginger and manioc. The only shop front worth a pause—for the young and brave—is Allô-stop, a unique organization that for a minimal fee introduces would-be hitchhikers to drivers who are bound in the same direction.
But there is hope. With the examples of the Galerie Colbert and the Galerie Vivienne to inspire them, Paris’s architectural watchdogs appear to have persuaded the Assistance Publique, which owns the boarded-up Passage du Grand Cerf, to restore this once lovely, airy passage located near the Forum des Halles. Its glass will be renewed and its aerial walkways under the skylights will again survey healthy commerces. Improvements in its neighbor, the Passage Bourg-l’Abbé, now chiefly devoted to wholesale underwear manufacture, will surely follow, because late-twentieth-century urbanists have awakened to the amenity value of the passage.
But beware! There are passages and passages. Paris’s contemporary property developers have appropriated the name but spurned the extravagance of the glazed roof. However glitzy the boutiques that line the passages and galeries of the Champs-Élysées, they cannot compete with the haunted and haunting charms of the nineteenth-century passages.