Paris is often more beautiful on the inside than from the street.
Behind an ordinary doorway, Paris often hides a garden, a passage or a story most visitors never hear.
This is the city of shopkeepers, printers, tailors and market porters, and of the covered passages Parisians invented to escape the mud of the streets, each with its own personality and its own secrets.
Along the way, a library you'd never think you could walk into, a revolution that began at a café table, a neighbourhood that dressed Paris, and a market street that has been feeding Parisians since long before the postcards.
Perhaps you'll linger under a glass roof as the light changes, step into a reading room where only the pages turn, or stop for a pastry in a shop that has been baking since the eighteenth century. Each stop opens onto the people behind it: who built it, who lived there, and why it is still standing.
