Vivienne has clothes boutiques, a famous wine store (Le Grand) and one of the old book/curiosity shops that are a feature of the arcades (the daddy of them all is Libraire Paul Vulin in Passage Jouffroy).Passage Choiseul, also on rue des Petits-Champs, is a different experience. There are shops for collectors of old pipes, coins, medals, and magnificent model figures. On the right are Le Petit Robe Noir selling second-hand couture little black dresses from every decade; and the world's most luxurious shop for gardeners, Le Prince Jardinier.Behind Palais-Royal, on rue des Petits-Champs, two arcades run side by side and join at the rear: Colbert and Vivienne. Colbert has been taken over by the University of Paris, its shops turned into offices and classrooms. Their shops are typical of the arcades where, as Walter Benjamin wrote, "antiquated trades survive".
"C'est superb!" exclaimed a French family who wandered in behind me.From Vero-Dodat, I crossed to the Palais-Royal. Nowadays its interior is a classic Paris square (mercifully traffic-free) composed of sand-coloured gravel, rows of box-cut trees, green metal chairs and a spectacular soaring fountain. With its brass shop window frames and trim, its ceiling medallions of lounging classical nudes, its glass roof with double row of bistro-globe lights and its black and white check floor (the original was marble), it's an austere but elegant introduction to the arcades. In the early 1800s it was a hive of wooden galleries lined with shops (and notoriously crowded with prostitutes) - these led to the arcades which, in their turn, led to department stores and today's shopping malls The arcades were among the city's first iron constructions. Their architectural influence shows in the Eiffel Tower and in those amazing, baroque galleries and domes in the grands magasins such as Galeries Lafayette and Printemps.Two sides of Palais-Royal remain as shopping galleries. The arcades were capitalism's cradle, where everything important about modernity began, from mass entertainment to window shopping. I set out to walk through Paris's arcades on a sunny morning.
I reckoned it would take me about three hours, moving at the easy pace of one of Benjamin's fl?urs - the rich idlers (and poor bohemians) who created the art of "reading" a city by strolling. In a small street behind the Louvre, a gap between two buildings signals Passage Vero-Dodat, constructed in 1826 by two men who made their pile as pork butchers. Until recently, Paris's arcades were little known, even to Parisians. Most guidebooks either don't mention them or list them only briefly. Their heyday was in the first half of the 19th century and, although fashion moved on, many of the 20 to 30 passages built between 1800 and 1860 have survived, concentrated on the right bank of the Seine around the old Biblioth?e Nationale The story of their rediscovery is a strange one. It is due to the German-Jewish critic, philosopher and revolutionary Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940.
