On a wet December afternoon in Paris, the best place to be is under the glass roof of a nineteenth-century arcade. It is that sort of month. The sky is often a low pewter lid, and rain falls on about 13 days. For a slow visit, though, it is a very good one. We would keep the mornings for a single museum and let lunch run long, because the December day here really begins at dusk, when the boulevards are lit and there is nowhere in particular we need to be.
The covered passages of the Right Bank mostly went up in the first half of the nineteenth century as shopping streets with a roof, out of the weather and the traffic, and one walk can string several together. The Passage des Panoramas, opened in 1799, is the oldest, and Passage Jouffroy carries on directly across Boulevard Montmartre. Galerie Vivienne, by the Palais-Royal, is the handsomest, with its mosaic floor and glass roof. The passages lost their shoppers to Haussmann's boulevards and then to the department stores, and the walk west to Boulevard Haussmann follows that story.
Galeries Lafayette and Printemps stand side by side on Boulevard Haussmann, and both dress their windows around a new theme each year. Galeries Lafayette also raises a giant Christmas tree beneath its glass cupola. The windows are built for children, so leave the front row to families and go inside to look up at the dome, which is the better reason to come. Go on a weekday, when there is room to stand still under it.
From the second half of November into early January the trees along the Champs-Élysées are wrapped in lights each evening. In shoes that shrug off wet stone, walk the avenue downhill from the Arc de Triomphe to Concorde and you arrive at the Tuileries, where a Christmas market and funfair usually fill the garden's northern edge over the same weeks. It is fine for an hour. The market we would cross the river for is the small one in Square René Viviani, on the Left Bank opposite Notre-Dame, where the stallholders sell only things made in France. In the same square, by the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, a black locust leans on concrete props. The botanist Jean Robin planted it in 1601, and it is the oldest tree in Paris.