Convents gave way to the state's chief auditor

An ancient sea bed underlies a quarter of spectacle and money

Beneath the pavement here lies a transgressive marine deposit laid down between 56 and 34 million years ago — siltstone threaded with marl and claystone, the residue of a shallow sea that once lapped over this part of the Paris basin. Closer to the surface, a thin skin of Quaternary clay, gravel and sand — river-worked ground barely 11,000 years old — is what actually bears the weight of the street.

You are standing in the tightly wound heart of the 1st arrondissement, in the shadow of the streets around Place Vendôme and the Rue Saint-Honoré. Seventy metres from you sits the Cour des Comptes (France), the state's supreme audit court — a body descended, through the upheavals of the Revolution and Empire, from the old royal chambers of account, now housed a short walk from where you stand. Almost the same distance away, the glass-and-stone Mandarin Oriental, Paris opened in 2011, a five-star newcomer among far older neighbours.

Just beyond your immediate footing, at 251 Rue Saint-Honoré, stood the Nouveau Cirque, Joseph Oller's "New Circus," opened in 1886 and among the first buildings in Paris lit entirely by electricity — its ring could be lowered on hydraulics to become a pool for aquatic shows, until it was demolished in 1926. The block has always run on spectacle and money in equal measure: within a hundred metres or so, the Castille Paris hotel now occupies ground between the Place de la Concorde and Place Vendôme, next to Chanel's headquarters, while the Euronext Paris exchange — Europe's second-largest bourse by market capitalization — sits 160 metres off, a descendant of the old Paris Bourse.

Convents, revolutionary clubs and a bomber came and went nearby

A few hundred metres east, the royal monastery of Saint-Bernard, better known as the Couvent des Feuillants, was founded in 1587 by Henry III and later became the meeting place of the Feuillant Club during the Revolution; Jacques-Louis David used its church nave as a studio for The Tennis Court Oath. Nearby, the Couvent des Capucines — a convent of Capuchin Poor Clares built by Marie de Luxembourg — once stood on what is now Place Vendôme itself before its demolition in 1806.

Two hundred and fifty metres away, the Salle du Manège, an indoor riding academy, served as the seat of France's revolutionary legislatures from 1789 until 1798, before it was pulled down in 1804 to make way for the Rue de Rivoli. The French First Republic itself was declared not far from here, in September 1792, in the convulsions that reshaped this whole quarter.

Violence has visited these blocks too: on 15 March 1894 the anarchist Désiré Pauwels detonated a bomb at the entrance of the Madeleine church, a few hundred metres north, dying shortly after from a gunshot wound — likely self-inflicted — during the "Era of Attacks". Grander and gentler history sits at similar range: the Hôtel Ritz Paris, opened in 1898 behind an eighteenth-century façade overlooking Place Vendôme, became one of the first hotels in Europe with electricity, telephones, and en-suite bathrooms in every room. Nearby, the 24-metre inflatable sculpture Tree, installed on Place Vendôme in 2014, provoked such outrage over its resemblance to a butt plug that its creator, Paul McCarthy, was assaulted and the work vandalised within two days. On Rue Royale, Maxim's restaurant has served as a byword for Belle Époque extravagance since the turn of the century, its Art Nouveau interior preserved above in a private collection.

Roman pottery marks ground inhabited long before Vendôme existed

Half a kilometre from where you stand, archaeologists have logged Paris as a findspot for Samian ware — glossy red Roman pottery traded across the empire — a quiet reminder that this ground was inhabited and provisioned long before Vendôme or the Feuillants existed. The marine siltstones and marls beneath your feet extend for kilometres under the city, part of the same Eocene basin that determined where the Seine could cut its terraces and where later builders would find firm enough footing to raise the mansard roofs and grand boulevards that now ring this square.