In which we visit the Passages de Paris

On the walls of our apartment are many black and white prints of photos taken by Robert Doisneau, a French photographer. One that has always intrigued me shows a waiter hurrying down the Passage des Princes with a tray full of food. (And yes, given what we know about the photographer, I realize that it is highly likely that the photo was posed.) Behind him one sees what looks like an indoor street, with shops along the sides and a giant clock mounted high on the wall above him. What was this Passage des Princes? Did it still exist? Are there others like it in Paris?

Friday morning I decided to keep Cherry home from school again, seeing as how she was still feverish on Thursday evening. Blaise needed to work, however, so he wanted us out of the apartment--with Cherry. It seemed the perfect opportunity to see if we could find some of these passages and explore them.

First, a few notes on the history of the passages. They were built primarily during the 19th century, and provided a place for shopping and congregating away from the horses and clamor of the streets. As sidewalks became more prevalent and horses were replaced by other modes of transportation, these passageways began to fall out of favor. More recently, however, several have been restored, and new shops and restaurants have opened alongside the older ones.

Now, we needed to select our passages. Ideally, we would be able to find two (or even more) that we could move between on foot, without having to bother with busses or trains. Along boulevard Montmartre, I discovered that there were two passages, not just on the same road but virtually opposite one another along that road.

The first passage that we visited was Passage Jouffroy, the first of the Parisian passages to be heated. (If the heat is still working, they definitely did not have it turned on. It was C-O-L-D in there.) We walked past many stores carrying home decor, much of it antique (or at least fake antique--since I was just looking in the windows I wasn't really in a position to judge (not that I would be anyway)). Past a bookstore with very old books on shelves touching the ceiling. We stopped in a little shop with miniatures on the ground floor because Cherry wanted to look at the dollhouses, and discovered that upstairs was filled with classic wooden toys and puzzles for children (much too upscale to be for kids) as well as kits for making felted dolls, knits, and any number of other fiber objects. Of course my mother was thrilled, since her true love is fiber arts, and she ended up buying roving in a rainbow of colors so that she and the kids could make felt butterflies and teddy bears.

At the end of the passage, we noticed that it seemed to continue on the other side of the street, and so we crossed into a somewhat more dilapidated section which was full of more antique book and furniture sellers. (After we got home I discovered that this was not, in fact, an extension of Passage Jouffroy but rather Passage Verdeau, an entirely different passage.)

Next, we headed back toward the entrance to the passage, stopping at a candy shop for some nougat and olives au chocolat and across the street to the Passage des Panoramas, the earliest of the Parisian passages. We passed stamp dealers and coin dealers and more stamp dealers. In case you were wondering, buying a complete set of French stamps from 1917 is very expensive. From 1997, not so much. Where the Passage Jouffroy had tea shops and candy shops, the Passage des Panoramas had proper restaurants, and lots of them. By this point we had been walking for a couple of hours, it was almost noon, and we were all getting hungry. So we found a restaurant with a reasonable formule and stopped for lunch.