Tonight a group of amateur ragtime musicians are busking in the middle of the bridge. When they pause for a break, I sneak a head start and race Sébastien toward the next pedestrian bridge, just past the Musée d’Orsay. The museum’s old train station clock glows an eerie green above us. This newer bridge, with its steeply sloping, neo-technical metal, appeals to almost no one and is therefore empty. Without Éric and Fabien along to provoke suicidal races down its often rain-slickened slopes, we pass it by.

A faint mist has started to fall, emptying the streets still further. We head on past the gold dome of the Invalides, yet another magnificent seventeenth-century building that borders the Seine, and cross back over the Seine to the Right Bank at the glitzy Pont Alexandre III, in order to follow the good sidewalks. The first stone of the Pont Alexandre III was laid in 1896, the giddy nineties, by the Tsar Nicolas II. With its bronze, copper, and gold, and its thirty-two ornate clusters of streetlamps—more than a hundred lanterns in all—the bridge always appears dressed up for an evening of luxury. It is, with the Opéra Garnier, the most ornate monument in Paris; while during the day it looks a little gaudy, at night it is in its element.

It is raining a little now, light drops. We could turn back, or we could catch the Métro home, but we don’t want to. It is too much fun to be going on, to share moments as we pause and look at things, to pretend to race, under the rain.

To our right, where the gardens of the Tuileries meet the place de la Concorde, La Grande Roue de Paris sparkles and glitters like some garish, grand country fair. This great Ferris wheel was set up to celebrate the year 2000 and then caused considerable legal problems when its owner refused to take it down again.

We could turn on to the Champs-Élysées, but since the whole avenue is about as interesting and authentic these days as a Twinkie, we stick with the Seine. The Eiffel Tower starts dancing with lights again as we head toward it, and we reach Trocadéro about fifteen minutes after midnight. The Eiffel Tower looms up over us so that we can see the nuts and bolts of it, see it for the grandiose architectural triumph that it was. It is another turn-of-the-century construction that is at its glamorous best at night, looking almost clumsy and uncomfortable during the day, like a six-foot-plus supermodel among average people. But at night, dressed up in lights, she is superb.