‘The poor and the well-to-do lived side by side in the same street’

An account of the Marais in its earliest days and during the time when it was the Paris headquarters of the nobility. The medieval coexistence of the splendiferous and the noisome is evoked, and the importance of the area for later literary figures such as Scarron and Madame de Sévigné is examined along with the work of the two great chroniclers of pre-Revolutionary Paris, Restif de la Bretonne and Louis-Sébastien Mercier – respectively voyeur and flâneur extraordinaire. Restif speaks warmly of a group of Jewish families he encountered, whereas Mercier, writing in the year before the Revolution, views the neighbourhood as a dismally staid backwater – a portent of the decline that lay in store.