The secret Marais — the doors visitors never open

If the Place des Vosges is the historic drawing room of the Marais, the most interesting things are sometimes behind doors that passers-by hardly notice.

First-time visitors follow the main lines: Bastille, the Rue Saint-Antoine, the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, the Place des Vosges. For those who have come many times, the better question is no longer where the famous sights are, but: what do Parisians know that visitors do not?

The Marais is one of the finest places to answer that. Behind façades that look unremarkable stand hôtels particuliers, courtyards, gardens, passages, artists' workshops, and the traces of an older Paris still alive inside the modern city.

The Hôtel de Sully, and a small door

Start with the Hôtel de Sully at 62 Rue Saint-Antoine. From the street you could walk past without realising you are in front of one of the most valuable buildings in the quarter.

Go through the great gate. The noise of the street drops at once and a cour opens in front of you — the courtyard of an aristocratic house. It was built in the early seventeenth century and later belonged to Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, an important figure under Henri IV. The courtyard and garden are open freely today.

The best part is at the back. Cross the courtyard and the garden and you reach the orangerie, an elegant piece of architecture with five great arches and a sundial cut into the stone.

But look for the small door on the right. It leads straight through to the Place des Vosges.

That is the sort of detail worth finding: instead of taking the usual street, you pass through a seventeenth-century mansion and emerge under the arcades of the square. Give it twenty-five to forty minutes, unhurried.

Village Saint-Paul

Another corner lies behind the Rue Saint-Paul. It feels almost like a small village caught inside Paris: courtyards and antique dealers making a world quite unlike the grand shopping streets.

This is not necessarily a place to buy antiques on the spot. Treat it as a laboratory of taste. An old lamp, an Art Deco chair, a small painting or one decorative object can become the focal point of an apartment on the Place des Vosges.

The medieval wall

For something entirely different, look for the stretch of old city wall on the Rue des Jardins Saint-Paul — a surviving piece of the fortifications, standing in the middle of ordinary modern life.

To a casual visitor it may look like an old wall. To anyone who likes history it is another layer of the city: modern Paris built over medieval Paris, and the Marais still holding traces that other districts have lost.

Give it fifteen minutes — not to sightsee in the usual sense, but to explain to a child how the city they are standing in has changed over several hundred years.

A small garden on the Rue des Rosiers

The Jardin des Rosiers–Joseph-Migneret, at 10 Rue des Rosiers, is the kind of place that makes the Marais particular: you are in one of the busiest quarters of Paris and one small turning brings you to a quiet patch of green.

It has none of the scale of the Luxembourg, none of the grandeur of the Tuileries. Its smallness is the point. Fifteen or twenty minutes here work well in the middle of a walk, especially with children or older members of a family.

Look at the square from under the arcade

Then go back to the Place des Vosges and try something: do not look at the square from the middle of it. Look at it from under the arcade.

Walk the arcades slowly and watch the almost perfect repetition of red brick, pale stone, windows and high roofs. Then start looking into the galleries — Le XVI Art Gallery, Art Symbol, Modus Art Gallery, De Medicis Gallery and others.

What is pleasing is that you can move from sightseeing to cultural buying without changing location. A work of a few thousand euros, a few tens of thousands, or more, can be looked at in the middle of a walk. It is a very different way of spending: buying a story, a point of view, and a piece of Paris to take home.

The Musée Carnavalet

One more place, for anyone who cares about architecture. This is not only a museum of history: the two hôtels particuliers that make up the museum are themselves a lesson in more than 450 years of Marais building.

The collection occupies two historic mansions, with courtyards and gardens restored for the public. The Carnavalet garden is a very pleasant pause. With a family, allow forty-five to sixty minutes; if you only want the architecture and the garden, less will do.

Curation, which no ticket can buy

An ordinary visitor can buy a three-hour tour and be given fifty facts. What is worth more is a guide who says: “Do not go straight on here. Turn through this door.” And an old courtyard appears. “Do not photograph it yet. Look up.” A seventeenth-century relief comes into view. “Now go through that small door.” And the Place des Vosges opens in front of you.

The Marais does not hide its best things far away. It hides them just behind doors most visitors never think to open.