PARIS MATCH

Royal roots and boho cool, French trad and cosmopolitan flair: Thomas Chatterton Williams visits the Marais and finds the perfect mix.

-  Thomas Chatterton Williams

It was a week into September. The summer holidays that figure so powerfully in France's conception of itself had just concluded, and Paris was fully in the swing of la rentrée, the highly choreographed moment when the whole nation returns from vacation to school and work, and the café terraces overflow. This ritual of collective reconnection and reappraisal, the chance to look afresh at familiar things, has been one of my favourite aspects of life in France since I moved here from Brooklyn, where there are certainly shared seasons, but there is far less uniformity of routine.

As my family and I got back to Paris after a couple of weeks by the sea, it occurred to me that I had been living on the city's Right Bank for a dozen years. I had raised children there for a decade and, until the pandemic, commuted from my apartment in the 10th Arrondissement to a light-filled office space I shared in the lower Marais, at the point where the Seine wraps the Île St.-Louis in its embrace. I had always loved that area and felt that circumstance had deprived me of it too soon.

As the disturbances of the COVID era have receded further into memory and tourists have flocked back to Paris-once again the most visited city in the world-the Marais has begun to feel more vibrant and alive than ever. A perpetual hub for the roving fashion-week crowd, it is now also the Airbnb destination of choice for artists, curators, and gallerists making the pilgrimage to the Paris edition of Art Basel in the autumn. In a city that changes famously slowly, there are new restaurants and shops cropping up there at an unusually rapid pace. So I leaped at the opportunity to indulge in a staycation at a new hotel not far from the office I used to rent. My daughter, Marlow, who was about to turn 10, joined me.