Passage Sarget

The guide to Passage Sarget in Bordeaux opens with a puzzle: a shipowner, Baron Jean-Auguste Sarget, paid to build this covered arcade in 1833 and then simply left it locked for forty-five years, with no shop ever opening beneath its glass roof. It follows the passage from that strange dormancy to its 1878 opening to tailors, clerks and hawkers, the Mercury imagery still overhead, and a 1919 sale to the city framed as a safety measure on the dangerous street next door. Look up at the restored glass and cornucopia carvings before you look down at what excavators later found under the floor.