Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris

"Yes, Jacques Hillairet spent decades and decades writing about Paris. His other books are about Paris cemeteries or particular Paris churches and general histories of old Paris. He was passionate about it. He lived to be 98 years old and he spent much of his life walking around Paris and studying the history of its streets. There are over 5,000 streets in Paris. In fact there are, at the last count, 5,334 streets. Exactly. Now they have all been knitted together, as has happened in London. But, Parisians still talk of les villages de Paris . The charm of this book is that, as with any dictionary, you can get lost in it. You jump from one thing to the next. You will never walk down a Paris street again, after you have read it, without looking at everything on that street and just wondering about the centuries of history of each of the buildings. Yes we do tours, and I also write a great deal about walking. My book, Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Ligh t is about the quintessential Paris, if you will. It’s divided into three: Paris Places, Paris People and Paris Phenomena. My wife and I get a huge number of requests for walks around the Marais district, which is where we have lived for all these years. It is primarily 17th century although there are some older buildings and obviously some newer ones. People love to be taken along the back roads and into courtyards they don’t know they can get into. I really enjoy showing people the hidden things and taking them into the nooks and recesses. Many are open to the public. Visitors might quite normally go into them but often wouldn’t understand their significance. Millions of people visit the Place de Vosges, for instance, but very few know much about it or its history. Now they are curious to see where Dominique Strauss-Kahn lives! We like to mix and match the past and the present and sometimes speculate on the future."