This is the dry-weather walk: 2.7 kilometres that ducks under glass roofs for most of its length, which makes it the one to keep for a grey afternoon. The thread is the passages couverts — the covered arcades the nineteenth century built to shop in before department stores — strung between two of the city's finest enclosed spaces.
Start in the Jardin du Palais-Royal, where Buren's striped columns of 1986 sit in the front court and the arcaded garden waits behind, calmer than anything on the streets outside. North through Galerie Vivienne, the grandest arcade of them all, mosaic floor under an 1823 glass roof. Place des Victoires is the one open stretch — a ring of matched façades around Louis XIV on his horse.
Then the run of passages: the Panoramas, oldest and busiest, good for a late lunch under the glass, straight on across the boulevard into Jouffroy. Double back to the Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu and end in its Oval Room — free, open to anyone, and one of the great reading rooms in the world. Grands Boulevards is the way out.
