Carré Marigny

[1] The Carré Marigny was featured as a location in the Stanley Donen film, Charade (1963), starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.

The space was donated to the city of Paris for this specific purpose by a rich stamp-collector after open-air philatelic exchanges had been evicted from the Palais-Royal in 1864 and from the Luxembourg Garden shortly thereafter.

Within ten years after the 1849 appearance of the first postage stamp in France, the new pastime called philately had become a full-blown craze, first among university students, then among the public at large.

Today there are more than fifty dealers in the Carré Marigny offering a large selection of stamps and postcards from all over the world, as well as phone cards.

Along Avenue Matignon, there is a second category of vendor, comprising individuals known as the "wet feet", since, unlike the officially sanctioned sellers, they are not protected by a tent, and on rainy days, they find themselves ankle-deep in the puddles, exchanging postcards or stamps.