Passage Choiseul

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Three blocks west from Galerie Vivienne along rue des Petits-Champs, lined with wine bars, delicatessens and design shops, lies passage Choiseul, alluringly dark and dingy-looking. It was here, in the early 1900s, that the author Louis-Ferdinand Céline lives as a boy, and judging by his account of it in the autobiographical Death on Credit, it was none too salubrious a place: "The gas lamps stank so badly in the stagnant air of the passage that towards evening some women would start to feel unwell, added to which there was the stench of dogs' urine to contend with". Nowadays the only aromas you're likely to be assailed with come from the takeaway food shops, which keep company with discount clothes and book stores, bars, art galleries and Lavrut, at no. 52, a well-known supplier of artists' materials. Also here is an entrance to the théatre des Bouffes Parisiens, where Offenbach conducted the first performance of Orpheus in the Underworld.