From Roman amphitheatres to cannonball-pocked mansions, this Paris cycle tour is a revelation
Cycling proves a wonderful way to see the city. It’s less tiring than walking, you don’t get footsore and the pace is perfect.
Arriving in a new city and feeling like an out-of-my-depth ignoramus is hardly a novel concept for me. I’ve made something of a career out of it. But Paris raises the stakes. Perhaps it is the shame of sliding my passport to the hotel check-in staff – dressed without explanation in the same shade of purple as Barney the Dinosaur – then watching their faces fall as it becomes apparent that Monsieur French can’t speak a word of French.
Probably I’m paranoid; definitely I’m jet-lagged and perhaps not ready for the kaleidoscopic fever dream that is Le Grand Mazarin, the latest five-star hotspot in the hip and historic Jewish quarter, Le Marais.
Come morning and my equilibrium is restored. This hotel is gorgeous. My third-floor room has a tapestry canopy above the bed, bedside lamps shaped like fern fronds, whimsically painted wardrobes and a perfectly petite balcony overlooking a medieval cobblestone street that’s so narrow I could just about reach over to water the pot plants on the building opposite.
The hotel’s Middle Eastern/Eastern European restaurant, Boubalé, opens to the street and is a total scene. There’s a cabaret-style speakeasy in 50 shades of rouge, a day spa and a pool with a fresco splashed across a vaulted ceiling. It’s luxury like nothing else. Still, I’m not sure about the purple uniforms.
Feeling more comfortable in my skin, I remind myself that Paris has always been a city of outsiders. On the plane over I watched Woody Allen’s 2011 fantasy film Midnight in Paris, about a disillusioned American screenwriter who time-travels to the 1920s to hang out with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, a cohort of expat artists and writers who bonded in the bohemian cafes and smoky jazz clubs of inter-war Paris. Stein would later dub them the “Lost Generation”.
The mythologised romance of Paris continues to lure young dreamers, such as our bicycle tour guide Marley Bangert, who moved from Ohio ostensibly to study French history and literature at Sorbonne University (“Big books and big migraines,” she says with a sigh), but more importantly to live magic Paris moments, such as drinking red wine at a cafe on Île Saint-Louis while crying over a break-up, looking across the Seine to the city and thinking: “I’m heartbroken in Paris … this is awesome.”
I have only two days to get my head around Paris, and have decided to do it on two wheels, on the guided Hidden Paris Bike Tour, hitting the backstreets and hearing the backstories of Paris that the guidebooks usually glaze over. Cycling proves a wonderful way to see the city. It’s less tiring than walking, you don’t get footsore and the pace is perfect.
In a decade Paris has become one of the world’s most bike-friendly cities, with more than 1000km of bike paths. A further €250m investment aims to make the city 100 per cent bikeable by 2026. For this, we have another expat to thank: Paris’s Spanish-born mayor, Anne Hidalgo.
The city is still largely asleep on this chilly Saturday morning as we slip through the quiet streets of Le Marais. Our first stop is Hotel de Sens, an eye-popping 15th-century gothic mansion with a surprising blemish – look closely between the turrets and gargoyles and you can spot a cannonball lodged high in the stone wall, a souvenir from the July Revolution of 1830, when Louis Philippe toppled King Charles X. The insurrection went so well that Louis was installed on the throne on the first day; his supporters celebrated by getting rip-roaring drunk and misfiring a cannonball into what was an empty house. “Revolutions don’t come more French than that,” says Marley, as we push on to visit an even more engrossing time capsule.
When Napoleon III – nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte – was elected as the first president of France in 1848, he did two very Napoleon-like things. First, he made himself emperor, and second, he tore down most of Paris and rebuilt it with massive boulevards. Le Village Saint-Paul escaped the reno, so remains preserved as a rare snapshot of pre-1850s Paris. We float through slightly haunting and shadowy tangles of cobblestone courtyards and 13th-century buildings housing a smattering of mostly shuttered antique stores and galleries, like a renewal project that never quite took off, possibly because no one knew the place was ever here.
Life is in full swing, however, around the corner at Place des Vosges, Paris’s oldest square. Fresh-faced couples walk designer dogs in the sun, and immaculately dressed mums chat as their kids play in a sandpit beneath a canopy of spindly chestnut trees. The square was built in the early 1600s by Henry IV originally as a royal compound, before the king realised he could make a lot more money selling off the ornate residences around it. They remain among the most expensive real estate in Paris; one reportedly sold for €31m ($53m) a few years back. Another is the former residence – now a free museum – of Victor Hugo, an author I’ve felt an affinity with since learning that his method for curing writer’s block was to lock himself in his room naked (it doesn’t work, by the way).
We leave Le Marais and cross the Seine to the Left Bank, walking our bikes through the Jardin des Plantes, Paris’s oldest botanical garden, and pausing to reflect at the Grand Mosque, where during World War II hundreds of Jews were reportedly issued with Muslim identity cards and secreted out of Paris via the mosque’s sewers, a courageous act of interfaith humanity.
On we roll, cycling through the Latin Quarter and straight into (if you’ll believe it) a 1st-century Roman amphitheatre, where a handful of young Parisians are playing a lively game of ultimate frisbee. Below the weathered stone terraces lies the old gladiator entrance, and next to it the area where the lions were once caged.
Used for performances long after the Romans were kicked out of Paris around 400BCE, Arènes de Lutèce became a massive burial ground during the bubonic plague, then lay overgrown and forgotten for hundreds of years. It was uncovered during Napoleon III’s famous renovation, but it took a campaign by our favourite nude writer Victor Hugo to secure its protection. It’s surely Paris’s best kept secret – not so much hidden as so well integrated into the neighbourhood that it no longer stands out. “This place is loved by the community,” says Marley, “but if you didn’t live here you wouldn’t know it existed.”
Our penultimate stop before farewelling Marley is the Pantheon, named by Louis XV after the patron saint of Paris, St Geneviève, whom he credited with curing him of syphilis (the randy king was said to have had over 300 affairs). After the French Revolution the church became a mausoleum, and it is the final resting place of dear Victor Hugo. In 2021 it inducted its first black woman, Josephine Baker, the African-American cabaret singer and civil rights activist who joined the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s and aided the Resistance during the war, hiding secret codes in her sheet music to foil the Nazis. Just another expat doing Paris proud.
Checklist
Getting there:Take the RER B train from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Châtelet-Les Halles (approximately 50 minutes), then walk a few blocks to Le Grand Mazarin. A taxi or Uber may be quicker or slower, depending on traffic.
Stay: Le Grand Mazarin (17 Rue de la Verrerie, legrandmazarin.com) has 61 rooms, including 14 suites. Classic rooms from €650 ($1120); suites from €1088.
Eat: Get a taste for the cross-cultural cuisine of Le Marais on a Paris Ultimate Food Tour with Devour Tours (devourtours.com). I can still taste the delectable pastries from Maison Aleph, the French onion soup from Les Philosophes bistro and the crispy but tender crunch of traditional Polish Yiddish latkes (shredded potato pancakes) from Jewish bakery Sacha Finkelsztajn.
Do: Bike About Tours (bikeabouttours.com) offers a variety of small group and private bike tours around Paris. The 3.5-hour Hidden Paris Bike Tour is a steal at €45. Context Travel (contexttravel.com/cities/paris) specialises in arts, history and culture-focused walking tours, covering everything from the Renaissance to the Revolution to the Resistance and guided by experts in their field.
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