Saturdays are for wandering, for drifting along streets that reveal themselves slowly, in textures, light, and stories.
Take the short walk from the Place du Carrousel at the Louvre, crossing the sweep of rue de Rivoli and slip into Rue de l’Échelle, a narrow, 200-metre slice of Paris whose calm surface hides a far darker past. In the Middle Ages, the bishops of Paris raised their échelle de justice here, a ladder-scaffold gallows where the condemned swung against the old ramparts. Centuries later, Napoleon’s pickaxes shattered those medieval walls as he pushed to fuse the Louvre with the Tuileries an imperial project abruptly halted in 1815.
Haussmann followed, carving through a dense warren of alleys, including the rebellious passages of the Frondeurs and Anglade,to draw Rue de l’Échelle into the geometry of his modern Paris. Today it seems quiet, almost understated but this is a street with an extraordinary past, shaped by ambition, revolution, and relentless reinvention.
A short street in the 1st arr. where you go from gallows to matcha in three steps.
“The streets of Paris are best explored slowly — they reveal themselves only to the unhurried.”
Part of the “Streets of Paris” Series
Each Saturday, we wander through the streets of Paris — tracing light, texture, and the quiet poetry of daily life.
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