Le Marais

The place, briefly

Le Marais is the part of Paris that Haussmann did not get to. The name means the marsh, which is what the ground was until the Knights Templar drained it in the twelfth century. Between 1600 and the Revolution it was where the aristocracy built, which is why the quarter is full of hôtels particuliers — the Hôtel de Sully, the Hôtel de Soubise, the Hôtel Salé that now holds the Picasso museum — standing behind gates on streets too narrow for the boulevards that were cut everywhere else.

After the Revolution the aristocracy left and the quarter became a working district: workshops in the courtyards, and from the nineteenth century the centre of Jewish Paris, around the rue des Rosiers. That history is not decorative. The plaques on the schools in these streets record the children deported in 1942, and the rue des Rosiers is still where you go for the food.

By the 1960s the buildings were in bad enough condition that demolition was a real prospect. André Malraux, then culture minister, had the quarter protected in 1964, which is the reason it looks the way it does. The restoration took decades and made it expensive.

The reason Le Marais is in this atlas is what arrived after that. Since roughly the 1990s it has been the centre of gay Paris — the bars, the bookshops, the businesses, concentrated around the rue Vieille du Temple and the rue des Archives. That is a recent fact, and the recentness is the point.

James Baldwin's Paris was not here. He arrived in 1948, drank at La Reine Blanche on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and met Lucien Happersberger there in 1949. Giovanni's Room does not mention the Marais, and neither did the world it describes. In Baldwin's decade the visible homosexual life of the city was on the Left Bank, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a few hundred metres of boulevard on the other side of the river.

What happened afterwards was a migration in stages. Saint-Germain held it through the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s the centre moved to the rue Sainte-Anne near the Opéra, a smaller and more discreet street of clubs. In the 1980s it moved again to Les Halles, after the market was demolished and the quarter was rebuilt. From the 1990s it has been here.

So the Marais is the current end of a line that starts in Baldwin's bar. A reader who walks the rue Vieille du Temple on a Saturday night is standing in the fourth address of something that was on the boulevard Saint-Germain when Giovanni's Room was written, and that had to keep moving because rent, redevelopment and policing kept making the previous address impossible.

The quarter is easy to walk and worth a whole day. The place des Vosges, finished in 1612, is the oldest planned square in Paris and the best thing in it. The Musée Carnavalet holds the city's own history, including the porcelain ashtray that is nearly the only surviving object from Le Fiacre, the Saint-Germain bar where Baldwin drank.