The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. Paul Bogard

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      For any noctambule, Paris held plenty of challenges. The narrow streets had no sidewalks, and death by stagecoach was not an infrequent event. “There are nights when all the disadvantages of a crowded quarter are apparent at the same time,” Bretonne wrote. “As I was coming off rue du Foarre, a large marrow bone fell at my feet. Its sharp force and the force with which it was hurled would have made a lethal weapon of it, had it struck me.” As his walk continued, he faced a “sheet of soapy water” thrown from a window, then a bucket of ashes. Still, things could have been worse. The city’s dirt and pebble streets were lined with sewage and waste, the air filled with a rank stench that we could only imagine by standing in a town dump. Writes historian Roger Ekirch, “The Duchess of Orleans expressed amazement in 1720 that Paris did not have ‘entire rivers of piss’ from the men who urinated in streets already littered with dung from horses and livestock. Ditches, a foot or more deep, grew clogged with ashes, oyster shells, and animal carcasses,” and “most notorious were the showers of urine and excrement that bombarded streets at night from open windows and doors.” William Hogarth’s painting of London in Night, from The Four Times of the Day (1736), might just as well have been a city street scene from Paris: A woman pours a bucket of human waste out an open window onto the back of an unfortunate man who staggers along with his wife. He holds a stick and she a lantern and sword. Oh, and a bonfire burns in the middle of the narrow street behind them.

      Amid this dimly lit craziness it might be difficult to believe that street lighting could be a source of bitterness and anger. But in the years before the French Revolution, street lighting was often a thorn in the public’s side. From its start, public street lighting had been significantly motivated by the state’s desire to gain control over the streets at night, and for many Parisians the oil lamp simply stood for tyranny. When lanterns were at first hung low, they made for easy targets, destroyed with walking sticks. But when the lanterns were then hung out of reach, a new technique emerged, that of cutting the lantern’s ropes and letting the lantern smash into the street. At times, like the modern-day smashing of Halloween pumpkins, smashing lanterns was simply a form of entertainment. As Schivelbusch writes, “Whatever the details and methods, smashing lanterns was obviously an extremely enjoyable activity.”

      While the candle lanterns and réverbères are long gone, and electric lighting makes Paris today as bright overall as any city its size, the echoes of such history remain. Though some complain that old Paris has become a museum or even that it’s dead, I think it anything but, and I think that especially at night. What’s kept alive is the opportunity to add your story to those countless stories before, even to add to your own story if you have been here in the past. Because so much of the old city has been preserved, you can come back to Paris and the night you walked years ago will still be here.

      The year after high school, while backpacking nine months through Europe, I remember especially a week in Paris, in the winter, alone. I had lucked out and discovered a small hotel on the Île de la Cité, the Henry IV on the Place Dauphine. I would set out each night and walk for hours through old Paris, the gray-black Seine there to guide the way, the long, gray ministry buildings with rooftops black and windows dark, the French tricolor spotlit in front. I would stand on the Pont Neuf and wonder where this life would lead.

      As Downie and I continue our stroll, I tell him that the night I reached the city this year, I took the métro from the Gare du Nord to the Champs-Élysées, near the Arc de Triomphe. A wet snowfall weighed on tree branches and café awnings, crystals sparkling. The snow snarled rush-hour traffic and slowed walkers with its slushy challenge, casting a hush over the sounds of wet tires and boots. The leafless smooth-barked plane trees along the avenue were filled with small white lights, bright with a tinge of sky blue, each with two or three long bulbs like fluorescent ceiling lamps dark except for a periodic slide of light down their length, the movement like one of melting snow sliding down a rock face or roof. At the end of the wide Champs-Élysées boulevard, I wandered past the bright blue-white Ferris wheel (La Grande Roue) set up for the season in the enormous Place de la Concorde, the famous city square where King Louis XVI lost his head to the guillotine and where the spotlit Obelisk—a 3,300-year-old Egyptian column—stands seventy-five feet tall. From the Place I skirted around the locked and deserted Tuileries gardens, which, during the day, fills with couples and families and solo strollers, and found myself among the stone buildings of the Louvre Palace, where black lampposts ring the courtyard with bright light. Then, along the Seine to the Île de la Cité, past the large Christmas tree filled with navy-blue lights in front of Notre-Dame, around the cathedral onto Île St.-Louis, and through the amber-lit Marais neighborhood to my hotel. All told, a walk of nearly two hours, but in that time I saw much of the old city. No museums or galleries or music or events, not even a glass of vin rouge or a quick stop at a créperie. But the City of Light on a dark winter’s eve and nearly for free, the priceless sensation of having returned to something once mine.

      “Everything belongs to me in the night,” wrote Bretonne. In Paris more than two hundred years later, that truth remains: Everything is accessible, at least to your eyes—monuments, famous buildings, ancient streets. Little is closed off as you walk this city at night. Even—as the lights come on in apartments you pass—other people’s lives.

      Downie nods. “My wife says it reminds her of an Advent calendar, the way the windows suddenly come to life.” We’ve reached the Place des Vosges, built in the early 1600s, the oldest planned square in the city, lined with grand two-story apartments. “That’s a seventeenth-century painted ceiling,” he says, pointing. “This city is full of unbelievable interiors, and you only see them at night.”

      In a neighboring apartment are long maroon drapes pulled back from French doors, the lifted slant top of a grand piano, and in the corner on the wall a stag’s head. “Now, speaking of expensive,” Downie says, “this is a double pavilion owned by one man, one very rich family. They’ve owned it for a hundred seventy years. And if you look, see that tapestry? It’s a sixteenth-century tapestry. If other lights were on, you would see amazing things because he’s one of the most successful auctioneers in the country.”

      These are rooms into which, during the day, I would never be allowed. But at night, walking Paris, invited into room after room, life after life, I feel welcomed to enjoy the beauty this city offers. And I want to know more.

      François Jousse emerges into the Parisian evening as though from out of the shadows, ambling toward me from behind the enormous Christmas tree in front of Notre-Dame. With his bushy beard, red plaid coat, and camel-colored hiking boots, he looks like a lumberjack. It turns out that those boots are key—Jousse likes to walk Paris, day and night, and that’s what we have agreed to do: a tour of central Paris so he can tell me about his work. He is immediately jovial, friendly and cheerful, clearly delighted to be talking about lighting the city he loves, albeit slowly in English with a heavy French accent. He begins many of his sentences with “Alors …,” meaning “So …,” before explaining something new. There is much to explain, because there has been so much thought put into the lighting of Paris. And the man who has done much of that thinking, the man who has done so much to create the atmosphere of Paris at night, is François Jousse.

      We start at Notre-Dame, where in 2002 Jousse oversaw the completion of a ten-year, multi-million-dollar upgrade to the cathedral’s exterior lighting. For several decades after World War II the cathedral was simply spotlit, and then only its façade. Before the war, it had spent centuries in darkness—a Brassaï photograph from the early 1930s, shot from Île St.-Louis, shows the cathedral from behind, lit only by surrounding streetlights, a dark hulking shape as though carved from coal. Not until recently—not until Jousse—did the city take seriously a relighting of one of its most enduring landmarks. “For the lighting of the cathedral we made a competition, a jury with clergy, cultural minister, city of Paris—many people,” he says with a slight grin, “and it was very, very difficult.” Jousse tells me one idea was to have the cathedral’s famous stained-glass rose window lit from within, a proposal of which the clergy disapproved. СКАЧАТЬ