Paris "by night"

You say it, "Paree bai naitte" (in a cheesy Pierrot-speak-ze-engleesch accent) and everyone seems to want a piece of it.

The latest "I love Paris in the nighttime" victim is Elaine Sciolino, writing in the NYT travel section. She describes walks around Paris's monuments late at night, after the tourists and commuters have-- mostly-- gone home. She's right: the Cour Carrée is breathtakingly gorgeous at night, and I've got the blurry underexposed photos to prove it. You think that Henri IV is going to walk through one of the guichets at any second. The Rue de Rivoli, the square in front of the Comédie Française, the Hôtel de Villle (especially when it had the adorable multicolored "Paris 2012" sign on it during the Olympics campaign), the dome of the Institut or the sparkly lights on the Tour Eiffel- yeah, it is all that. Not to mention the Panthéon or, even, as she mentioned, the neighbors across the street ... I used to look at the Centre Pompidou late at night, and wonder what contemporary installation it was flickering there, after the gallery lights were off.