Sometimes it seems there isn’t a centimeter in Paris that hasn’t been discovered, described, and recommended. Yet even frequent visitors who know the city well can often get the feeling that the “real” city somehow remains elusive.

In the pages of Quiet Corners of Paris, first published in France, the author has found more than eighty settings that provide a rare entrée into Paris at her most subtle and delicate. Most wouldn’t be considered “destinations”, and certainly not tourist attractions. There are winding lanes that lead nowhere in particular, but that are exquisitely lovely in themselves (one called allée des Brouillards, “fog alley”); rue Georges-Perec, one of the city’s smallest streets, is a mere staircase without a single numbered address. There’s a square in the fifteenth arrondissement where pétanque players gather in a “sublimely relaxing provincial atmosphere with an almost Mediterranean feel…right down to the sweet scent of pastis.”

Not all of the places that Jean-Christophe Napias recommends are obscure, but many have been overlooked despite being in the best-known neighborhoods of Paris. In the sixth arrondissement, for example, he has found a string of small courtyards that he predicts will soon be locked to non-residents and should be seen right away, if only to glimpse what may be the only antique pas-de-mule (a three-footed metal stool used to step into a carriage) left in Paris. There’s also a well with a pulley and gargoyle-sculpted rim from the fourteenth century, and, in a connecting courtyard, the base of a tower from the medieval city walls of Emperor Philippe Auguste.

The author often sprinkles his atmospheric descriptions with literary quotations or historical anecdotes.

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