I live in an apartment in Paris located in the 11th arrondissement. My place of work is located in the 3rd arrondissement. The distance between the two buildings is about one mile. I have been traversing this route daily for many years, through the four seasons, morning and evening. Sometimes I travel by foot, sometimes by bicycle. Along the way I pass beggars, people lined up to have documents processed at the police office, bakeries, Boole players, dog walkers, people chattering in cafes, school groups exiting or entering a hotel that specializes in school tourists, tourists puzzling over maps, city workers cleaning the streets, and wholesalers unloading racks and boxes of clothing.

This reader is entirely convinced that the author has walked these streets, including the ones that are no longer there, many times. His book takes you there with his own feet.

A pattern of streets is a record of how an urban space is used. In my two districts, the direction of the streets — what they are connecting — and their width are an immediate record of time. One does not need a set of historical maps to judge the age of the streets. Streets designed for carts and horses are narrower than boulevards designed for armies and artillery. Two walkers cannot pass each other between the parked cars and the parking ticket machines on the older streets, and a truck unloading food for the school or metal bars for a workshop blocks even bicycles and motor scooters from passing. The name of a street will change at an intersection, recording the fact that this street went from here to there perhaps for centuries and later another street was made to go from there to someplace further in the same direction. Or a street name will change from rue Saint Antoine to rue Faubourg Saint Antoine to mark the former inside and outside boundary of the city.

Hazan’s prose brilliantly evokes this sense of time written in the streets for all those parts of the city he knows by foot. As I read along with his footsteps, I have the sense of walking with a man who carries an enormous library of French literature and history in his head. I have spent perhaps too many hours poring over the Turgot map, a masterpiece of eighteenth century draftsmanship which represents, on sixteen large plates, not only every street but a complete elevation of every building that existed in the Paris of the 1730s. This has helped me see beyond the current street grid and understand where the Temple used to be, but this mere 280 years is myopic compared to what Hazan sees. In his eyes each current district can be understood by an essential shape defined by buildings and boundaries that once were there, whether that shape was a hill since flattened or stream now covered that predates any hotels created during the Bourbon dynasty or rows of theatres and cafes in the 1860s. His description of the Marais, now the 3rd and 4th arrondissement, is a good example:

This is illustrated by one of the hand-drawn maps Hazan created to show where the streets and main buildings once were. He draws in a few lines the 15th century. The presentation is as erudite as it is artisanal. I had no notion of the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles, as they were already gone in the eighteenth century map, but once he describes them I can see how they shaped the districts that are there today.

I am reminded of Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, which contains graphic maps of the Bay Area by a dozen artists illustrating different dimensions of the region’s natural, social and political history. What Solnit does collectively (and as a result not coherently), Hazan accomplishes with solitary ease and simple line drawings. He shows you what he sees with his own words, the judiciously selected words of the literature he has absorbed and his own simple sketches. This reader is entirely convinced that the author has walked these streets, including the ones that are no longer there, many times. His book takes you there with his own feet.