A couples more passages couverts can be found on rue Vivienne: one aptly named Galerie Vivienne, and the other called Galerie Colbert. Traditionally rivals but today each with its own activities, the former is a bustling passage with cafés, bookshops, print-sellers and hidden apartments while the latter housing university departments and administrative offices which inevitably also means security presence at the entrances that dissuade most that it’s a passage no longer open to public.

I always nip over to these passages if I am in the area – most likely because I have a dinner date at one of the many Japanese restaurants around rue Ste Anne and rue des Petits-Champs – and ponder what the apartments hidden behind the few mysterious doors in between the shops of Galerie Vivienne are like. It’s a tough question – I don’t know anyone who lives there, and I have never manage to catch an occasion where someone is coming out and I could slip in the door behind him/her. One day, maybe. One day…