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 Lumi re. 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 fa ades, 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. 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. 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. Though some of the grand cafes and theaters are still around, the Avenue de l'Op ra, 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.