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Designed by town planners in the nineteenth century to give pedestrians protection from mud and horse-drawn vehicles, the passages (shopping arcades), between the Grands Boulevards and the Louvre, are enjoying a new lease of life as havens from today's far busier traffic. For decades they were left to crumble and decay, but many have now been renovated, their tiled floors and glass roofs restored. Their entrances, however, remain easy to miss, and where you emerge at the other end can be quite a surprise. Many are closed at night and on Sundays. Between rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs and rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Galerie Vero-Dodat , is the most homogeneous and aristocratic of the passages , with painted ceilings and panelled shop fronts divided by black marble columns. It's named after the two pork butchers who set it up in 1824. Although the galerie is a little dilapidated, with peeling paint on many of the shop fronts, fashionable new shops have begun to open up in place of the older businesses. Retaining the old style at no. 26, Monsieur Capia still keeps a collection of antique dolls in a shop piled high with miscellaneous curios. The beautifully lit Galerie Colbert , one of two very upmarket passages linking rue Vivienne with rue des Petits-Champs, contains an expensive 1830s-style brasserie, Le Grand Colbert , to which senior librarians and rich academics from the nearby Richelieu site of the Bibliotheque Nationale retire for lunch. The flamboyant decor of Grecian and marine motifs in the larger Galerie Vivienne establishes the perfect ambience in which to buy Jean-Paul Gaultier gear, or you can browse in the antiquarian bookshop, Librairie Jousseaume, which dates back to the passage 's earliest days. Three blocks west of the Bibliotheque Nationale is a totally different style of passage . Just like a regular high street, the passage Choiseul , between rue des Petits-Champs and rue St-Augustin, has takeaway food, cheap clothes shops, stationers and bars, plus a few arty outlets along its two-hundred-metre tiled length. It was here that the author Louis-Ferdinand Celine lived as a boy, a period and location vividly recounted in his novel Death on Credit . For a combination of old-fashioned chic and workaday you need to explore the passage des Panoramas , the grid of arcades north of the Bibliotheque Nationale, beyond rue St-Marc, though they're still in need of a little repair and don't have the fancy mosaics of the other arcades. Most of the eateries here make no pretence at style, but one old brasserie, L'Arbre a Cannelle , has fantastic carved wood panelling, and there are still bric-a-brac shops, stamp dealers and an upper-crust print shop with its original 1867 fittings. It was around the Panoramas, in 1817, that the first Parisian gas lamps were tried out. In passage Jouffroy , across boulevard Montmartre, a M. Segas sells walking canes and theatrical antiques opposite a shop displaying every conceivable fitting and furnishing for dolls' houses. Near the romantic Hotel Chopin , Paul Vulin sets out his secondhand books along the passageway, and Cine-Doc caters to cinephiles. Crossing rue de la Grange-Bateliere, you enter passage Verdeau , where a few of the old postcard and camera dealers still trade alongside new art galleries and a designer Italian delicatessen. At the top of rue Richelieu, the tiny passage des Princes , with its beautiful glass ceiling, stained-glass decoration and twirly lamps, has finally been restored, but unfortunately lies empty - high rents have chased out the shops that were here. Its erstwhile neighbour, the passage de l'Opera, described in surreal detail by Louis Aragon in Paris Peasant , was eaten up with the completion of Haussmann's boulevards - a project that demolished scores of old passages . Back in the 2e arrondissement, close to Mº Etienne-Marcel, the three-storey passage duGrand-Cerf , between rue St-Denis and rue Dessoubs, is stylistically the best of all the passages . The wrought-iron work, glass roof and plain-wood shop fronts have all been cleaned, attracting stylish arts, crafts and antique shops.
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