Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

Wanderlust
Some enchanted evening
A romantic traveler meets his destiny -- and a beautiful Romanian named Anika -- for one brief night in Barcelona.
By Todd Gottlieb
[07/02/99]

Travel Advisor
A cheap sleep in San Francisco
Our expert offers tips on top budget hotels in San Francisco and Alsace, airlines' emergency ticket-fee waivers and Maine's coastal treasures.
By Donald D. Groff
[07/01/99]

Book Bag
My private Riviera
"Tender Is the Night" transports me to my own version of the French Côte d'Azur.
By Don George
[06/30/99]

Out of the Blue
Flying the queasy skies
Sometimes turbulence is just the start of your problems.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[06/29/99]

Once upon a time in the Sinai desert
An impetuous camel safari with two Bedouin guides opens up an enduring ancient world.
By Laura Fraser
[06/26/99]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Downie

July 3, 1999 | Night had fallen. Lights began snapping on, illuminating room-by-room the interior of the Ile-Saint-Louis mansion. We stood outside its thick stone walls, leaning on the crumbling parapet above the Seine, and glanced from the river's inky waters to the mansion's twinkling windows.

Women wearing tailleurs and men in tuxedoes mingled under a frescoed ceiling. Huge portraits painted by a forgotten 19th century dauber stared down at the merrymakers, the maid with her silver tray, and out to where we loitered on the quayside.

A bateau-mouche cruised downstream, its blinding lights further illuminating the tableau being played out above us. Another boat slid along behind it. This time my eyes followed the shifting, intricate pattern of leaves projected onto the building's façade as the boats followed the river's flow.

One by one the tuxedos and tailleurs on the mansion's second floor replaced their emptied champagne flutes on the maid's silver tray and slipped out. Two chauffeur-driven limousines whisked them away. The maid looked down, spotted us and yanked the shutters back till all we could see were slits of light.

By silent accord my wife and I gave up looking at the river and began to peer instead into other buildings on the island, drawn to their lights like proverbial papillons nocturnes -- a nice way to say moths. Around the corner from the mansion, a lamp winked on in a cozy mezzanine with low ceilings. There were leather-bound books and shaded sconces over small oil paintings. We could just make out a liquor cabinet and a stag's head. Someone moved, casting shadows across the walls. We wondered if the owner was smoking a cigar.

Soon streetlamps flickered on around us, pooling yellowish light across the stone sidewalks that ring the Ile-Saint-Louis. Farther east, facing the Tour d'Argent restaurant, we heard a piano and glanced up to another tiny mezzanine built above a carriage door. A straight-backed piano teacher with her hair in a bun instructed her pupil in what sounded like Beethoven's "Für Elise." The girl shifted on her stool and played a single bar over and over again before moving on clumsily, battling Beethoven. She wore a hairband and a long dress with ruffles and might have been lifted from Van Gogh's "Mademoiselle Gachet at the piano" -- the distilled awkwardness of French bourgeois girlhood.

As we made our way from one pool of lamplight to the next, rounding the island counterclockwise as we often do, we imagined a life story for the girl, for her piano teacher, for the man with the stag's head in his apartment -- oh, yes, he had to be a cigar-smoking man -- and then for the maid and each of the merrymakers from the mansion.

The bateau-mouches babbled by in four languages, splashing images on the façades, raining light on lovers hidden along the Seine, revealing interiors with Pompeii-red wallpaper and gaudy chandeliers, decorated ceiling beams, stucco encrustations, 17th century chimney pieces, the cluttered lodgings of elderly concierges. Glitzy and loud, the tour boats and their searchlights nonetheless transformed banal parked cars or sidewalk benches -- and strollers like us -- into elements of a magic lantern show.

The scene flowered in my mind. I began to realize why, in all my years in Paris, I have unconsciously loved night-walking. For one thing, daylight flattens and hardens Paris, emphasizing the smog-blackened gray of its plaster façades, the oppressive straightness of its boulevards, the maddening symmetry imposed upon it by Baron Haussmann and Napoleon III during the Second Empire.

Night-lighting, instead, brings out the bends and recesses, the jagged edges, the secret interiors, the sinuous quality of the Seine, the flying buttresses and other medieval escapees of progress.

Next page | The long and noble history of noctambulism in Paris