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By Root 1029 0

you to wander aimlessly: to discover a litter of kittens snoozing on a windowsill of one of the gabled houses at 10 rue Daviel, known appropriately as Petite Alsace. Or to trip down the cobbled rue Samson as it nears the rue de la Butte-aux-Cailles, racking your brain to recall which Jean Renoir film must have been set here. The architecture is modest, with none of the furbelows of monumental Paris, but it’s easy to imagine—or is it hear?—Georges Brassens melodies cooing from radios. Some of the Cailles’s streets perpetuate good country names—“Mill in the Meadows,” “Poplars”—seeming to defy the misguided urban planners of the sixties and seventies who permitted high-rises to be built not far away, like grim reality checks.

In your wanderings, you may sight residents loping with laptops to nearby lofts bowered by chestnuts, or backpack-encumbered Madelines sailing home from school unaccompanied in the quiet streets. In fine weather, the pharmacist, who elsewhere in the city would spend his quiet time officiously tidying, here takes the air, leaning against his doorframe, gossiping until a customer appears. And in a city that has at least three restaurants called Chez Paul, the Butte-aux-Cailles’s Paul, with its lace curtains and traditional grand-mère food, may be the most appealing. But then neighborhood standards are high, hoisted there by the inventive cooking of Christophe Beaufront of L’Avant-Goût.

IN THE SEVENTEENTH

Clear on the other side of town, Les Batignolles also began life beyond the city’s walls, on barely cultivated land. Here, in the 1820s and 1830s, developers constructed modest country retreats with patches of garden for the growing class of prosperous Parisian shopkeepers, who were soon joined by petty bureaucrats and washerwomen.

Everything and nothing changed with the coming of the railroads. The Paris–Le Pecq line, completed in 1837, cut the area off from the west. When Les Batignolles was annexed to Paris, Baron Haussmann’s engineering alter ego added a handsome park, the Square des Batignolles, but did little else to knit the backwater into the wider urban fabric. Low rents and an ample supply of laundresses and seamstresses willing to model attracted painters like Manet and Renoir. From 1865, they made the Café Guerbois and the Cabaret du Père Lathuille, on what is now the avenue de Clichy, the crossroads of artistic café culture, attracting Bazille, Degas, Pissarro, and Monet. But painterly Paris soon moved on, leaving Les Batignolles very much to itself.

Until lately. These days, two-career couples, delighted by its retro rents and sleepy, shabby-chic atmosphere, are snapping up apartments here. The neighborhood’s easy rhythms seem a world removed from the pressures of the Place de l’Opéra, little more than a mile away. Many residents find they can even walk to their law offices and banks. The organic market, held every Saturday just nearby, is yet another draw.

Like any French village worth its salt, Les Batignolles has a fine church standing at its heart. A semicircle of buildings frames the pretty place around neoclassic Sainte-Marie des Batignolles. The corner café boasts the confident name of L’Endroit and, within its varnished concrete walls, is every bit as edgy as the Café Guerbois was in its day. The trees along the southwest side of the church shelter a handful of timeless shops: a florist, a dealer in pretty bibelots, and a children’s outfitter with the sanguine name of Merci Maman. (Truth told, the children playing in the shadow of the boules game in the square beyond do look as though they mind their manners—but then more than a few of the newer Batignolles parents grew up in the strict and starched purlieus of the sixteenth arrondissement.)

The rue des Batignolles is the main drag, lined with pleasant boutiques, the local town hall, and restaurants. Then there’s the tree-lined rue Brochant, where you can admire the gilded curlicues on the Boucherie du Square, sample Christian Rizzotto’s ethereal cinnamon ganaches, and investigate the antique dolls at L’Atelier de Maïté. And