The man who created Paris

Paris remains one of the world’s most visited cities, and of those tens of millions drawn to its remarkably compact centre each year, the Marais district exerts a magnetic pull. Fashionable among aristocrats before Louis XIV – the “Sun King” – moved his court from Versailles, this pungent quarter of narrow streets and jumble of historic houses and courtyards sank into near-squalor in succeeding centuries before its renaissance in recent decades as a charming la…