Le Marais was literally a swamp: the name means "the marsh," drained across the medieval period by monks and the Knights Templar. Once Henri IV laid out the arcaded Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, in the early 1600s, France's nobility raced to build here, filling the district with hôtels particuliers, grand private mansions tucked behind carriage doors. When the aristocrats later decamped for the Left Bank, the quarter slid into a crowded warren of workshops and tenements, which, by accident, is why it survives. Baron Haussmann's boulevards, which flattened much of old Paris, largely bypassed it.
Today the Marais is one of the few places where you can still read the street plan of pre-Revolution Paris. You wander lanes too narrow for two cars, past galleries, boutiques, and falafel counters, then push open a heavy door onto a silent cobbled courtyard the street never hinted at. Around Rue des Rosiers the old Jewish quarter, the Pletzl, keeps its bakeries and delis; elsewhere the mansions now hold museums, from Picasso to Victor Hugo's apartment on Place des Vosges. It is a neighbourhood best simply walked, without a plan.