5 stops · 4.5 km
The Marais and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine
The walk starts in the Marais, among collectors and writers: the Cognacq-Jay collection of eighteenth-century art in a house of 1575, then Victor Hugo’s apartment on the place des Vosges. East of the Bastille it enters the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, for centuries the furniture workshop of Paris, where the cour de l’Étoile-d’Or keeps its courtyards and sundial behind a street door.
From there it climbs onto the old Vincennes railway viaduct and follows the Coulée verte, a garden walk above the streets of the 12th arrondissement, before ending somewhere much quieter: the Picpus cemetery, where the victims of the last weeks of the Terror lie in two pits and Lafayette beside his wife. It is a walk that moves from pleasure to gravity; leave time for the end.
4.5 km · about 60 min of walking
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Musée Cognacq-Jay3rd · The eighteenth-century treasures of the couple who founded La Samaritaine, now in a Renaissance house in the Marais.
↓ 700 m · 9 min walk
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Maison de Victor Hugo4th · Sixteen years of Hugo’s life in a corner of the place des Vosges: the plays, the grief, the first drafts of Les Misérables.
↓ 1.0 km · 14 min walk
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Cour de l’Étoile-d’Or11th · Two cobbled courtyards of the furniture-makers’ faubourg, with a 1640s staircase, a sundial and the workshops that replaced a garden.
↓ 530 m · 7 min walk
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Coulée verte René-Dumont (Promenade plantée)12th · A railway viaduct turned into a garden walk above the 12e, the first of its kind, with craftsmen’s workshops in the arches below.
↓ 2.2 km · 30 min walk
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Picpus Cemetery12th · A convent garden that became the burial pit for 1,306 victims of the Terror, and where Lafayette lies under an American flag.
Start: Saint-Paul 1 480 m · 6 min walk
Finish: Nation 1269 530 m · 7 min walk