The Eiffel Tower suddenly fizzes like a bottle of champagne: lights sparkle and dance up and down it. Cynical Parisians stop in their tracks, point, and exclaim with delight. You would never imagine that they had seen this before, that every night for a year now, for ten minutes on the hour, the Eiffel Tower had gone off like a magic act. It was 2001, and that’s the way Paris wanted to be at the turn of the millennium: glorious, exciting, and fizzing like champagne. Sébastien and I, too, have seen the Eiffel Tower go off countless times, but as always, we stop and watch it. I seize the handlebars of my scooter with pleasure; Sébastien grins at me and slips a wind-chilled hand under my hair, against the nape of my neck.

All the stress seems to have drained out of the city, leaving it hushed and calm. All the stress has drained out of us, too, allowing our energy and happiness to expand and fill us. All the ancient, famous buildings and bridges that are gray stone in the day have become luminous gifts, golden against the night. The people we pass are few and on skates themselves, or strolling, in no hurry. They, too, have lost their daytime grimness. It is quiet, and yet it feels as if the true life of the city has emerged.

Sébastien races ahead on the smooth sidewalk, then circles back to meet me, to catch my waist and either push me very fast or pretend that I should drag him like a train engine drags cargo cars. We pause, laughing, near the Pont des Arts to listen to musicians playing. This straight wooden bridge crosses the Seine just in front of the entrance to the Louvre’s smaller, interior courtyard, a place of intimate vastness, with a round fountain that draws those who sneak away from the larger daytime crowds in the main court around the Pyramide. The smaller courtyard is cobblestoned, though, and the skating crowd tends to gather in the smoother, larger one, behind the Pyramide. When Éric and Fabien and other friends come with us, I sometimes sit and watch over discarded coats while the guys play pickup roller-tag with strangers in the great courtyard.

When it is just Sébastien and I, we are more likely to linger near the Pont des Arts, although we don’t actually skate and scooter onto its teeth-chattering wooden boards. With a row of benches down the center and old-fashioned streetlamps stretching up and down it, the Pont des Arts draws throngs. Bands play on it, people meet on it, tourists sit and write in their journals on it, Notre-Dame and the verdant tip of the Île de la Cité visible in one direction, the Louvre to the side, and the Eiffel Tower in the distance. It is a superbly romantic spot.