The Marais, comprising the Third and Fourth Arrondissements of Paris, has always had spectacular architecture and exceptional museums. But in the 80s, when I first arrived in France and began wandering its lanes, the trauma caused by the deportation of almost 50,000 citizens from Paris’s largest Jewish quarter during World War II was still raw.
It’s been transforming itself ever since. The recent opening of Le Grand Mazarin, a five-star hotel at the corner of the Rue des Archives and the Rue de la Verrerie, has crowned these efforts. The idea of opening an extravagant hotel across the street from the BHV, which when I arrived was an endearingly frumpy normal-people department store with a much-loved hardware store in its basement, would have seemed laughable in those days.
