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Although I had landed two hours before, I was drinking wine and not coffee as I waited for a friend, a newly credentialed lawyer, to explain his concerns about civil liberties in his country At my back, shrieks rose My mistake had been remembering the yearly transformation of the Bassin de La Villette as festive This visit to a café on the canal’s bank had been my suggestion Floating dive bars lift anchor, replaced by kayaks and bulky platforms within which it’s possible to pilot a child’s plastic boat or, last year’s innovation, to swim A whine reached us from a zipline A boat whose deep pink sail bore a logo for the 2024 Olympics rotated slowly, moored unstably to two buoys The city’s bid was in Meanwhile, temporary metal fences cordoned off the canal, and last August, to walk alongside it, one had to submit to a guard rifling through one’s bag To another American, I pointed out Doric columns, the Villette Rotunda, built in the eighteenth century as a tollbooth in the city’s wall Like a tree, Paris has grown in concentric rings; this wall, where taxes used to be exacted, was succeeded by a looping railway, by the Périphérique highway, and, most recently, by a scheme called Grand Paris, which will incorporate some of the suburbs into an extended Métro web and administrative system So unpopular were the taxes – and, by extension, the Rotunda – that its architect, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, was imprisoned by revolutionaries in 1793 The American had heard of Ledoux’s dream, a city of three thousand inhabitants laid out radially around a salt works that the architect had built He sketched buildings whose geometries cross Neoclassical and ziggurat – Space-Age avant la lettre A vast orb sunk among mausoleums would serve as a cemetery As with the factory, which centred a director’s house the architect called a ‘temple of surveillance’, the design emphasised sightlines The panopticon was not, for Ledoux, incompatible with utopia On the contrary, in Chaux city, the architecture would refine the thinking of the citizenry[1] They would have nothing to hide Michel