1913

Paris past midnight is a magnificent creature, conjured from curving iron and café lamps. Its gardens swallow every color of spring. Electric lights pave the boulevards. Doors open to cabarets and salons, where sugar drips through absinthe spoons and pianos fall into familiar songs. Every corner is en fête, each shop window resplendent.

There is even more than this, for imaginers like yourself: people who entertain dreams beyond sleep. Men and women who compose stanzas as they stroll by the Seine often find themselves stopping, overcome with a strange want to turn toward the river’s Left Bank. It feels as if someone is calling, crooning the meter that has eluded them, the rhyme they’ve so long hunted. It makes them step past every regular haunt, until Notre-Dame de Paris cuts shapes out of the night. Here, in the cathedral’s shadow, the path turns, tugging toward the Fontaine Saint-Michel, where an angel and a devil clash in bronze. Many of your fellow imaginers will halt to study the sculptor’s work.

They do not know the statues study them in return.

Some never will, their minds deemed too empty of wonders. No angled alliteration, no winged tigers, no flames of ice. These people stare at the fountain water, which is made milky with starlight, and blink themselves back to sensibility. How late it is! What are they doing in the fifth arrondissement? Best to walk back now.

But you…

You pass the test. The sound of steps on stone causes you to turn, and only then do you notice that one of the fountain dragons has come to life. Lion head, serpent tail, feathers, and scales all moving seamlessly into an alley across the street. You decide to follow. How could you not? Down the street you go—the world changing at its edges—beneath lamps whose flames burn every color.

The door to the salon opens of its own accord. When you step inside, it becomes clear you aren’t the only one who’s been lured by the dragon.

“Welcome, welcome!”

“Come, friend! Dream and have a drink!”

The place is full of life: Painters, philosophers, poets. Ladies with loose hair and coal-struck eyes. Men whose cigarettes smell not of tar but cinnamon. Exhales leave their mouths in the shapes of zeppelins and dragonflies. Real birds cut through these clouds. One or two land on the loungers’ heads, rummaging amid hairs to pluck out a string of golden light before flying off again. No one seems bothered by this. They wave at each newcomer between their laughter and grab one of the many flutes filled with glowing drinks of all shades: green, violet, rose, sky.

A glass is pushed into your hand.

What is this place? The question never quite parts your lips, for the aperitif smells like a favorite childhood memory and tastes even better. Each tongue takes it differently: smoked butterscotch, fog on a valley floor—never something as straightforward as chocolate. By the time the beverage washes down, it doesn’t matter that the wallpaper’s flowers are blooming, or that the woman by the bar has gold skin around her eyes—bright as a saint’s halo—or that her gown of sheathed emerald feathers unfolds into wings.

Your hostess.

Your harvester.

No, no. It does not matter at all…

This is a place where the mind can play, a place any imagination would want to be.

There are other places for those who have eyes to see: The daydreamers and midnight wakers. The hungry-hearted. People who cannot help but try twisting knobs on locked doors, just to see if one will open.

They do, on occasion.

They open to boulangeries whose bread never goes stale, to cabarets where women grow wings and shed them just as quickly, to churches where the ceilings echo with gargoyles’ whispers, to the table of a fortune teller who claims she can change the stars themselves—though her price is far too steep for most. There is also rumor of a book—bound in leather and tucked in a shop in the ninth arrondissement—where you can read your ending in the final chapter.

But it is just as easy to ignore the future, to get lost in the enchanted mirrors of Versailles—which play their memories of lavish balls over and over again—or to find yourself wandering through Saint-Ouen’s flea market to the stall of the Fisherman of the Moon. Most of what he sells seems worthless: yellowed opera programs, chipped tea sets, broken watches, tattered maps, rusted keys, carnival tickets—all the usual bric-a-brac plucked from Paris’s finer garbage heaps. But if you open the pocket watch, you might find that its hands spin straight to a fateful hour—your fateful hour—then stop again. If you stare carefully enough, you might see phoenixes flying through the china teapot’s pattern, stirring the weeping blue willows and warming the spout’s porcelain with gold flames. “They keep any tea piping hot,” claims the Fisherman of the Moon. “This was Marie Antoinette’s favorite set!”

And who knows what other doors that rusted key might open?

It would be very, very tempting to try…

A word of warning, before you venture too much farther. Magic is not all wonder. Sometimes the shadows in an alley have settled for a reason—there are certain hidden corners that should stay hidden. There are some secrets that should remain entombed, locked inside the jaws of the catacomb walls, in skull after skull after skull after skull.

Every city is built upon its dead, after all.

Even the glittering ones.