A Valentine's weekend in Paris

Paris answered wet winters two hundred years ago with the passages couverts: 19th-century arcades roofed in glass and iron, tiled underfoot, lined with old bookdealers and tea rooms. Start at Galerie Vivienne by the Palais-Royal, opened in the 1820s, with a mosaic floor, a rotunda and the most elegant glass roof of the lot. Then walk north and chain the rest — the Passage des Panoramas, one of the oldest in the city, then the Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdeau across the boulevard, which deliver you almost to the door of dinner.

The Petit Palais, built for the 1900 World's Fair at the foot of the Pont Alexandre III, is a Beaux-Arts showpiece of mosaic and ironwork with a free permanent collection. At its heart, a colonnade rings a semicircular garden with a café in it — one of the very few places in central Paris to sit in a garden in February.

You climb a cramped spiral stair from a low, dim ground floor into Sainte-Chapelle's upper chapel, walled almost entirely in 13th-century stained glass — fifteen towering windows and a rose — and flat winter light makes every one glow evenly. It sits inside the working law courts, so entry is timed, ticketed online and security-screened: book the earliest slot you'll realistically make. Afterwards, walk ten minutes east to Île Saint-Louis for a slow, cold stroll with a coffee.

Musée de l'Orangerie is small, hushed, warm and done in under an hour — exactly what a day that's gone wrong outside needs. Cézanne, Renoir and Modigliani wait downstairs if you want longer.

Start low, in the Square Jehan Rictus by Abbesses Métro, where I love you is written more than three hundred times, in over two hundred and fifty languages, across a wall of dark enamelled tiles. It's ten minutes and unashamedly on the nose: find your two languages and take the photo anyway. Then climb the village lanes behind the basilica, quiet out of season, to the west-facing steps below Sacré-Cœur. The light goes around a quarter past six, and dinner by eight is easy.

Down a private lane off the rue Chaptal, at the foot of the hill in the 9th, the painter Ary Scheffer's green-shuttered house once hosted George Sand, Chopin, Delacroix and Liszt. Two studios, a courtyard and a free permanent collection make it a far better wet last afternoon than a wet climb to the basilica.