The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
How I fell in love with Paris – again
The City of Lights gives up a wealth of tucked-away treasures on a tour that captivates former guide Hannah Meltzer
Iwas less than sold on the idea of a “Secret Paris” tour. Having lived in the city for a year, and having worked there as a tour guide, I had a sound grip of the town’s hidden treasures. From tucked-away country villages in the heart of the city to the best spots for dumplings, I was quietly confident in the knowledge that the City of Lights had little left to hide from me.
I felt a bit sorry for my guide, softly spoken Frenchman Timothée Demeillers, who runs the Paris arm of Urban Adventures, a travel company that offers off-the-beatentrack city tours across the world. The emphasis is on meeting locals – and the “authentic” travel experience. The focus of today’s tour, I’m told, is cheese, art and local life.
Demeillers is, indeed, an authentic local. He grew up in western France and spent much of his adult life in the French capital. We meet on a crisp Saturday morning on Place de la Concorde, the imposing square flanked by the Tuileries gardens to the east and the Arc de Triomphe-straddled “triumphal way” to the west. But while grandeur is all around, my guide takes us through the square’s lessthan-concordant history; Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and thousands of other unfortunate noble folk met their bloody end here by the blade of the Revolution-era guillotine.
This tour doesn’t stay in one place for long, physically or historically, and soon we’re veering across the square to Rue St Honoré. We may have just learnt about France’s hard-won secularism, but we stop to observe a dozen immaculately dressed pilgrims, waiting for their place of worship – the flagship Hermès – to open its doors.
So far, the sights are familiar to me, but as we move through the streets, my guide delves deeper into the city’s chequered history. We stop at no 261 rue Saint-Honoré, the former site of restaurant Voisin, where – during the Prussian siege in 1870 – Christmas Day diners supped on cooked antelope, camel and elephant from the city zoo. From this springboard we’re on to the second German occupation of the capital, this time in the Forties, of which the vestiges can be seen in small bulletholes across the facades of some of Paris’s most famous buildings.
Of course, the city wears more recent scars. I was living in Paris in November 2015 when a string of terror attacks killed 130 people. Though I was safely at home, it’s difficult to shift the memory of that night’s news reports. It seems this is true for tourists, too. There was a drop in visitor numbers after the attacks and my guide’s business suffered a 25 per cent dip last year.
And yet Paris is still there in all its romanceinducing glory. We stop in at a new branch of La Durée, with its endless selection of macarons: coffee, salted caramel, orange blossom, rose petal, pistachio, cognac.
Chocolate (or macaron) box scenes of loveliness continue to Palais Royal, the lesser-visited palace next to the Louvre, whose courtyard is now home to a striking Daniel Buren sculpture installation.
Next on the agenda is the medieval market district Les Halles, recently Essentials A three-hour Secret Paris: cheese, art, and local life tour from Urban Adventures (0808 274 5111; urbanadventures.com) costs £52, including snacks.
redeveloped with a new £150million canopy structure housing boutiques and an Alain Ducasse restaurant. We then duck into Saint-Eustache church. The Gothic exterior and jewellery-box splendour of the Renaissance interior pack enough architectural detail to please any art history buff, but thanks to my guide, my attention is drawn to one poarticular glass pane. The vitrine was financed by France’s Corporation des Charcutiers and is dedicated entirely to charcuterie, in a nod to the area’s meat-vending past. Tableaux include SaintAntoine, the patron saint of charcutiers, as well as a reverential depiction of the cooking and serving of the porcine bounty. The walk is punctuated by stops in the city’s beautiful but under-visited “passages” – dinky, tucked-away walkways lined with boutiques, including Christian Louboutin’s first shop in the elegant Galerie Véro-Dodat and Pep’s, the city’s last umbrella repair shop, in pretty Passage de l’Ancre. Local eccentricity continues on to Rue Montorgueil, where we linger Pep’s is Paris’s last umbrella repair shop, above. A delicious treat at Stohrer, left
to inspect the chubby éclairs and glazed tarts at the historic Stohrer, Paris’s oldest patisserie, founded by the personal pastry chef of Louis XV’s wife. Our own Queen visited in 2004. “Mademoiselle! British? We ’ave the Queen ’ere, you know,” a regular customer beams, gesturing towards postcards depicting the royal visit.
The once working-class market
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As we eat, a tall elderly monsieur comes by with a slender elderly compagnonne. “They call him Pepino,” my guide says, “Spanish for ‘cucumber’, though he is actually Italian.” Pepino turns and winks at me, gesturing with a nod of the head to the elegant woman standing beside him. “C’est ma femme!” (It’s my wife). “Not bad, eh,” he says with a wicked smile.
Conversation turns to recent comments from across the pond, that “Paris is no longer Paris”. My guide is philosophical, suggesting that – as we have seen that day – the city has faced many challenges in its history: plague, revolutions, Nazi occupation. “Paris will always be Paris,” he says. “The visitors will come back. We will remember the attacks and grow stronger, and Paris will remain one of the most beautiful cities in the world.”
Meanwhile, says Demeillers, the drop in visitors has given him time and impetus to develop a stronger offering to satisfy even the fussiest tourist, including – I have to admit – this bothersome cynic.