To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Travel July 3, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/1999/07/03/paris Paris for voyeurs For those who walk at night, imagination soars in the City of Light. - - - - - - - - - - - - By David Downie 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. There are practical reasons, too, why nighttime strolling seems to me the finest way to experience Paris nowadays, especially in summer. The later the hour, the thinner the traffic, the cleaner the air, the more quintessential the scenery and atmosphere, stripped of their superfluous color and noise. When the cars and trucks and buses and guided groups fade away -- unless they're part of a Paris by night tour -- the city's magic steals back. Even garish Pigalle seems bizarrely wonderful with its sizzling neon signs and fluorescent teeth flashing mercenary smiles. Seen from afar, the Eiffel Tower becomes an eerie glowing skeleton. The Panthéon's leaden dome hovers weightlessly over a jigsaw puzzle of tin roofs. There's another practical reason I like walking around at night: We live above a dozen bars, cafés and restaurants, so in summer, that joyful season, there's little point in getting to bed before, oh, about 3 a.m. If you can't beat 'em ... Ever since the hot weather arrived, and I had my epiphany on the Ile-Saint-Louis, I've not only begun walking ever more and ever later at night, I've also been searching in literature for references to fellow night-walkers. It seems that noctambulism has a long and noble history in Paris. A strange sounding word, in English it simply means sleepwalking. But in French a "noctambule" is a night owl, someone who literally walks about -- awake -- in the darkness, a denizen of the night, a night-walker. To serve such people, there is even a Noctambus -- a late-night bus service whose symbol is an owl. Everyone knows that Paris is called la Ville Lumière or City of Light, but a century or more before it earned that moniker, a restless writer named Restif de la Bretonne pioneered the Parisian nighttime prowl. He recorded his adventures from 1786 onwards in "Les Nuits de Paris ou Le Spectateur nocturne," a rambling account of 1,001 nights spread over a period of many years. I was gratified to learn that De la Bretonne's first and favorite night-walks also began on the Ile-Saint-Louis, which, physically at least, must have been much the same then as it is today. The mansions were already 150 years old (most were built in 1600-30), the quays cobbled, the traffic sparse. De la Bretonne's nocturnal wanderings were lit by feeble réverbère lanterns -- oil lamps with reflectors -- that hung from the center of the street. As in the rest of central Paris, public lighting on the island today is a mix of handsome 1800s lamps and more recent units. The resultant glow entices papillons nocturnes from far and wide. In my reading and walking I've also confirmed that no other city cultivates so zealously its nighttime ambience, a sort of luminous identity card spelling out the words Ville Lumière. Ever since the term was coined about 100 years ago (probably inspired by the 1900 Universal Exposition), artifice is what the City of Light has been all about. Several hundred technicians, engineers and lighting designers work full time creating Paris' magical nighttime kingdom. They follow a master plan that covers the lighting of everything from pedestrian crossings to façades, monuments and bridges. Lamp posts are staggered at studied intervals and heights to produce a luminous blanket. Nothing is left to chance. Restif de la Bretonne may have invented the genre of nighttime sketches, but to many French people the literary night belongs to Charles Baudelaire. The inveterate noctambulist distilled his shadowy world most notably into "Le Spleen de Paris" and "Les Fleurs du Mal" -- flowers of evil nourished, with poetic license, not only by the sun but also by the flickering gas lamps of the Second Empire. Lamps that lit the wide new sidewalks of Haussmann's boulevards and the cafes and theaters and railroad stations that sprang up on them, where people came and went at all hours of the day and night in what had become the world's first modern metropolis. Being able to walk safely at night, under lamps on paved surfaces, was a novelty Baudelaire didn't take for granted: Paradoxically, for him it meant the death of old Paris. Today, many of the cannon-shot boulevards that Baudelaire tramped along, ambivalence in his heart, are nearly 150 years old and people now think of them as the quaint old quintessential Paris. I don't, and rarely include them (with the exception of the boulevards St-Germain, St-Michel and Montparnasse) in my noctural itineraries. Though some of the grand cafes and theaters are still around, the Avenue de l'Opéra, Boulevard Haussmann and dozens like them strike me as about the worst places in town for an amble. Even skillful illumination fails to give them charm. Here's something else I've deduced: Whether you have prurient inclinations or not, noctambulism induces voyeurism. Outside, in the dark, you can't help peering inside apartments, into countless doll-house tableaux. Exhibitionism is also part of the equation. Parisians are often unself-conscious and I sometimes wonder if they get a thrill by not drawing the curtains. Beyond the Ile-Saint-Louis, the most exquisite doll's houses I know are found in and around the Place des Vosges, the centerpiece of the Right Bank's fashionable Marais neighborhood. The square's 36 identical pavilions -- all of them built in the first decades of the 1600s -- offer remarkable architectural detailing throughout. And a chance to indulge your innocent curiosity. There are bull's-eye windows in the slanting slate roofs, arcades and painted timber ceilings. At times, the magic-lantern effect reveals the fabulous art collections of a former French minister, famous auctioneers and the old rich families who have lived here for decades or centuries. When the window-shopping culture vultures who cruise the Marais by day bed down for the night, the area's narrow streets and townhouses provide endless permutations for the intrepid noctambule. A head looms in a backlit, arrow-slit window on a tower jutting over the Rue Saint-Paul. Tattered curtains flap in a ghostly old building -- recently a squat -- in the Rue Pastourelle. Mystery awaits around every turn in the road. The Palais Royal is another nocturnal treat, its long, moodily lit arcades little changed since the days of Restif de la Bretonne (though what you now hear echoing as you go are not the clogs of prostitutes or the boots of assassins, but the taps of the well-heeled tripping home from fancy restaurants like Le Grand Véfour). One of my favorite night circuits wends from the Palais Royal via the colonnaded Bourse (the stock exchange), through ill-lit passageways and alleys to the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, whose hollow-eyed façades look like craggy cliff dwellings. The road changes names as it mounts in an arc past Notre-Dame-de-Lorette -- homely by day, almost pretty by night -- and Place Blanche to the famous hill crowned by that marvelously obscene basilica called Sacré Coeur. Over the centuries countless French and many foreign writers have contributed to the literature of noctambulism. In the 1920s and '30s, Louis-Férdinand Céline ("Voyage au Bout de la Nuit") trotted obsessively to and fro between Paris and the outskirts (near Levallois) where he lived, ruminating on the horrors of contemporary society. When he wasn't searching for outdoor urinals or gazing at his navel, Henry Miller was taking (or describing) his so-called "obsessional walks" -- presumably a kind of revelatory nighttime ramble -- around the Place de Clichy and Montmartre, under the night-lit silhouette of Sacré Coeur and its "savage teat" cupolas. When I walk around Montmartre I can't help thinking of Amedeo Modigliani, nicknamed Modì, which sounds like "maudit" and means, in French, "cursed" or "luckless." Modì may never have written about the night himself -- he used his pencil for other endeavors -- but his lustful wanderings are the subject of many a biography. It seems that if the perpetually thirsty and penniless genius couldn't be found at work in one of the hovels he occupied in the neighborhood, he was usually leaping from bed to bed, or mooching a drink in the Place du Tertre. This square and the streets fronting nearby Sacré Coeur are a zoo from dawn to about 2 a.m., daily, and if you're into high kitsch then be my guest. In the dead of night, though, they emanate a haunting sadness scented by sour memories (yes, the good old days are long gone) and stale beer. Roads like the Rue des Saules and Rue St-Vincent, instead, wrap around the backside of the hill to a small vineyard whose vines are imprisoned behind high walls and fences. I like to wander around it and over to the armspan-wide Allée des Brouillards -- Fog Alley -- which crosses an area once called Le Maquis, a no-man's land filled with ramshackle studios where Modì drank and smoked himself toward oblivion. Modigliani's Montmartre is dead and buried by junk food wrappers, but at night you can still spot the occasional (wealthy) artist's (stunning) atelier illuminated from within, or catch keyhole views of the city from streets that tilt and turn, like the Rue Lepic. I discovered recently that the lighting engineers have even transmogrified a series of Montmartre outdoor stairways into "light sculptures," a new expression of environmental art that taps into the magic of the night -- and might even help prevent tired tourists from tripping in the dark. Cost-free, non-polluting and amazingly safe, the best thing about noctambulism in Paris, however, is its inexhaustible variety. Here's another wonderful walk: Follow the curving Canal St-Martin from the Seine, along the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, all the way to La Villette on the edge of town. On cobbled sidewalks under towering plane trees you pass the Hôtel du Nord (atmosphere! atmosphere!), several drawbridges, mossy locks and the wild circular La Rotonde customs house designed in 1789 by visionary architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Or wander around Belleville, an unsung neighborhood in the 19th and 20th arrondissements, with surprising views from the Parc de Belleville, and enough ungentrified urban edge to keep your heart pumping. For a tamer tool, I walk all the way from the 24-hour cafes of Montparnasse across sleeping St-Germain-des-Prés to Notre Dame on the Ile-de-la-Cité and back home to the moody Marais. But my favorite night-walk will always remain that slow, meditative trawl around the Ile-Saint-Louis, guided by the words of Restif de la Bretonne and the lights of the bateau-mouches. When my wife and I finally got home the night of my great noctambulistic revelation, I sat on a bench in the square below our apartment and waited for her to climb the stairs and turn on the lights. True, there was no sweeping vista, and the building couldn't compete with the pavilions of the Place des Vosges or the Ile-Saint-Louis' mansions. But it wasn't too shabby, either. Above all, I now knew what all those charming noctambules stare at as they carry on till 3 a.m. in the square beneath our windows. Bonne nuit. salon.com | July 3, 1999