Paris

Why go

A city rebuilt as a single argument — Haussmann's boulevards, uniform stone and mansard skyline. Museums at every scale — the Louvre, and the fifteen small collections that are better on a second visit. The café as an institution — a table rented for the price of an espresso, for as long as you like. Neighbourhoods that behave like villages — twenty arrondissements, each with its own market and temperament.

The character

Between 1853 and 1870 Baron Haussmann drove ninety kilometres of boulevard through medieval Paris under Napoleon III, demolishing twenty thousand buildings and putting up forty thousand to a strict code: stone façades, aligned cornices, a balcony line at the second and fifth floors, mansard roofs above. The stated purposes were circulation, sanitation and light; the unstated one was that wide straight streets are hard to barricade. The result is the most systematically designed capital in Europe, and the reason the city reads as a single work rather than an accumulation.

What Haussmann did not touch is where Paris keeps its variety. The Marais survived, so did Montmartre and the medieval Latin Quarter lanes; the villages absorbed in 1860 — Belleville, Charonne, Auteuil — kept their street patterns and, in the east, their working-class character. That tension between the imperial grid and the pre-existing village is the city's actual subject. So is the café: the pavement table is legally and culturally a public room, and the price of a coffee buys an hour of it. Understand those two things and Paris stops being a monument list.

Places of character

Musée de l'Orangerie — Monet's Water Lilies in two oval rooms designed by the painter, daylight only, forty minutes. Passage des Panoramas and Galerie Vivienne — 1800s glass-roofed arcades, the ancestors of the department store. Marché d'Aligre — the market where Parisians shop, with a flea market attached and a wine bar in the middle. Père-Lachaise — a hillside cemetery of cobbled avenues; go for the topography as much as the graves. Palais-Royal at eight in the morning — a garden courtyard behind arcades, empty and quiet in the middle of the city. Canal Saint-Martin — iron footbridges, locks and the eastern city that Haussmann never reached.

The way to do it

Choose one arrondissement a day and walk it; the métro is excellent but it hides the city. Book the big museums for the first slot and leave by noon. Eat lunch as the main meal, as Parisians do, and take the café table seriously — sitting for an hour is the correct use of it. And keep one evening free for nothing in particular.

One perfect day

Coffee and a croissant standing at a zinc counter, then the Orangerie at opening for the Water Lilies in daylight and no crowd. Walk the Tuileries and cross to the Palais-Royal courtyard while it is still empty. Through the covered passages toward the Marais, with an hour in the Musée Carnavalet, which tells the city's own story better than any tour. Long lunch in the eleventh. Afternoon in Père-Lachaise walking the cobbled hill, then down to the Canal Saint-Martin as the bars put chairs out. Dinner at nine in a small room with a short menu, and a last walk along the Seine when the bouquinistes have shut and the bridges are lit.

Grand hotels

Le Bristol — 1925 on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with a rooftop garden and a hallway cat. Hôtel Ritz Paris — 1898 on the Place Vendôme; Hemingway's bar, Chanel's suite of thirty-four years, and the standard the word "ritzy" came from. L'Hôtel — six rooms in the Left Bank house where Oscar Wilde died in 1900, complaining about the wallpaper.

When to go

Best expression: late September to early November — clear light, the cultural season opening, terraces still usable. Consider: February, cheapest and emptiest, with the museums to yourself. Avoid if possible: August, when Parisians leave and a good share of the best restaurants close with them.

The frame

Ideal stay 5 nights · Minimum 3 nights · Best arrival by train — Eurostar or TGV into a nineteenth-century terminus · Airport CDG 25 km, ORY 18 km · Walkability exceptional, with the métro for distance · Best without a car essential