Sezane cardigan
Wilfred dress (similar)
Zara sandals (similar)
Sezane handbag
Celine sunglasses
Wolf Circus necklace
Celine necklace (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Les Archives Nationales – Paris, France
Paris, May 28, 2023
Dear friends,
Sometimes, taking a walk around Le Marais feels a bit like wandering through the archives of our past. Every street and landmark is familiar. And each one is home to dozens of memories of different experiences. Les Archives Nationales is no exception. When we lived on rue Saint-Sebastien, we discovered this imposing old hôtel particulier, whose gates are almost always open, early in the fall. Never shy to just walk through an open door, which is generally acceptable in Paris, we wandered into the courtyard, and then the gardens.
It’s easy to fall in love with the place, and we fell for this one quickly. Les Archives Nationales are housed in the hôtel Soubise, a manour house built largely with funds paid to the cuckholded husband of Anne de Rohan-Chabot, princesse de Soubise, by King Louis XIV, who was her lover. (“In consideration of services rendered,” he said, apparently.) The grandiosity of the place, which covers close to a whole city block, is worthy of its origin story. And though we’ve been here hundreds of times, often to take photos but just as often to pop in and look around because we can, we’ve never actually been inside.
Today is the today, we think. It will add a new dimension, a different perspective, to all of our experiences here, to see the courtyard by looking at it through the windows of the manour house. But we arrive to find the doors locked. We’re earlier than we expected to be. It’s Sunday, and we’re staying halfway across the city, but the metro is running on time, surprisingly. And we’ve done all that we planned to do in record time as a result. The archives, however, don’t open until two in the afternoon today. Weekend hours.
A momentary digression: It seems funny to talk about the archives of our live beginning in 2012, when I was already twenty-seven that year when we moved to Paris for the second time. I’d lived a life by that age, in Winnipeg and Vancouver and, already, even, a little bit in France. But in some ways, it feels as though a new phase or chapter started for us that year. And the streets of Le Marais marked our lives over the past decade in ways which, frankly, I wouldn’t have dared to dream were possible. Paris, and Le Marais, will always be a home for us. But we are, more than anything, walking through memories when we visit them now, as life changes and begins to call us towards new adventures.
And so, standing in the courtyard of Les Archives Nationales, we find ourselves with a choice to make. Do we wander the neighbourhood for three hours and return to the museum at two o’clock, no doubt laden down with shopping bags by that point? (Because if we have three hours to kill in this neighbourhood, that is how we will spend it.) Or do we agree that some things are best left temporarily undiscovered?
In the end, we choose to go in search of a different discovery – lunch. Les Archives Nationales will be here next time and maybe then we’ll step inside… or maybe we won’t. Either way, the hôtel particulier that houses them will always be part of our personal Parisian archives, a fixture in the background of hundreds of irreplaceable memories.
