Quartier du Commerce
France > Paris > Southern > 15e > Quartier du CommerceIf you start walking down avenue de la Motte-Picquet, by the École Militaire, you'll get the full flavour of the quartier du Commerce. That's the staid end, where brasseries throng with officers from the École, and 150 expensive antique shops in the stuffy Village Suisse (all open Thurs–Mon) display Louis Quinze and Second Empire furnishings. The nature of the quartier changes at boulevard de Grenelle, where the métro runs on iron piers above the street. Seedy hotels rent rooms by the month, and the corner cafés offer cheap plats du jour. It was in the rue du Commerce, which begins here, that George Orwell worked as a dishwasher, an experience described in his Down and Out in Paris and London. These days it's a lively, old-fashioned high street full of small shops and peeling, shuttered houses. Towards the end of the street is place du Commerce, with a bandstand in the middle, a model of old-fashioned petit-bourgeois respectability that could be a frozen frame from a 1930s movie. Cafés and pâtisseries proliferate as rue du Commerce ends at place Étienne-Pernet.
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