The eighth  arrondissement, wedged between the Seine and the Parc Monceau, traversed by the Champs-Elysées, is chic. Anchored by the Arc de Triomphe at the Etoile at one end and the place de la Concorde at the other, it embraces, as well, a substantial length of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The eighth is less predominantly residential than the impenetrable sixteenth— Paris’s equivalent of the Upper East Side— since it includes, along with its streets of elegant apartments, high-rent office buildings and such public monuments as those overblown Beaux-Arts exhibition halls, the Grand and Petit Palais, plus the Ministry of the Interior, the embassies of Great Britain and the United States, and the Palais de l’Elysée. The rue Royale and the Madeleine are just within the limits of the eighth, but not surprisingly for an arrondissement that boasts the avenue Montaigne, with its couturier shops and lavish apartment houses, those twin temples to middle-class consumption, Le Printemps and the Galleries Lafayette, lie outside its borders on the boulevard Haussmann. Most of what you see in the district reminds you of just what is meant by “bon chic, bon genre” and by the Parisians’ often-repeated boast “on est moderne ici”—Chanel suits, Hermès ties, and cell phones abound—but there is one corner of the eighth that feels very different from the rest: a small section, between the Gare Saint-Lazare and the place Clichy, sliced off by the railroad tracks.

It’s quieter there, more—well, nineteenth century. And it’s pleasantly déclassé.