Narrow stone streets of seventeenth century townhouses, and the square The Bourne Identity used as its Treadstone safehouse.
What Le Marais looks like
runs narrow and slightly bowed between Saint-Paul and the river, four- and five-storey stone townhouses close together on both sides with their shutters folded back against pale grey facades. Wrought iron balconies project over the ground floor shopfronts. Carriage arches break the frontage every few doors, leading through to courtyards behind. At the corner with Rue Tiron a restaurant fills the ground floor under gilded lettering, with tables out on the cobbles.
Carved Gothic tracery runs the full height of the corner turret at 54 , over a shopfront at street level. Streets nearby carry the same pale cut stone and the same steep slate roofs, broken by dormer windows along the ridge.
was built from 1605, its brick and stone arcades lined up on all four sides. The ground floor colonnade runs unbroken around the square. sits a short walk away, an eighteenth century square with restaurant terraces set along three of its sides.
The trades behind its market gate at 39 Rue de Bretagne. Stalls stand under a covered roof dating to 1628, the oldest covered market in France. Around , delis and kosher restaurants fill the ground floors, with Hebrew lettering on some of the shop signs.
Shot in Le Marais
The Bourne Identity's Treadstone safehouse stands above the restaurant at 2 Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine, where Nicky receives her instructions. Miloš Forman's Valmont shot interiors inside the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande on Rue Vieille du Temple.
The Bourne Identity, 2002
The Treadstone safehouse
Played The Treadstone safehouse, above Le Marché restaurant
Nicky receives her Treadstone instructions in the apartment above Le Marché restaurant, at 2 Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine. The building fronts the square directly, part of its eighteenth century block.
Valmont, 1989
Played Interiors for Miloš Forman's Valmont
Miloš Forman shot Valmont's interiors inside the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, a private mansion at 47 Rue Vieille du Temple. The building is not open to the public, and its own furnished rooms stood in for the story's Paris interiors.
What Le Marais can double for
Sablon in Brussels, Belgium
Cut stone townhouses climb Rue de Rollebeek and the streets around the Église Notre-Dame du Sablon in a pale stone close to the Marais's own, with carriage arches leading through to courtyards behind. Both quarters kept a narrow, pre nineteenth century street pattern while wider boulevards went in around them. Brussels stonework runs a shade darker and the roof pitches are steeper, so a wide establishing shot needs correcting for that. Tight street level frames hold up better than a rooftop view. Try searching cut stone townhouses courtyard now.
The narrow lanes around Ulica Szeroka carry the same mix of stone and plastered facades over ground floor storefronts as the streets near Rue des Rosiers, with synagogues and former Jewish institutions still standing among them. Kazimierz kept its own dense, pre-Haussmann layout through the twentieth century. Kazimierz's buildings run lower and plainer than the Marais's carved hôtels, so a wide shot looks like a poorer quarter unless it holds tight on a single storefront. Try searching narrow lanes synagogues storefront now.
Rue du Boeuf and the lanes around it are lined with stone stair towers, in the same dense, narrow street pattern as the Marais. Nothing here follows a straight nineteenth century grid, and the buildings press close together. The traboules, covered passages between streets, exist only in Lyon and have no equivalent in Paris. Lyon's ochre render and the traboules themselves are unlike anything in the Marais, so this only holds in a tight frame on a stair tower or a single courtyard. Try searching medieval stair tower courtyard now.
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