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The picturesque lightshow that, once the sun has set, takes place on the hour, every hour, when the Eiffel Tower is lit up for five minutes by thousands of coruscating bulbs, stops with a final spasm at 1 am It was unlit when I reached it at 3 am on a damp Monday morning The surrounding streets were deserted   When I set off across the Champs de Mars in order to stand beneath the Tower, my footsteps disturbed several rats that had been eating from the ruined litterbins full of tourists’ droppings The rats loped across the path in front of me and disappeared into the dirty pools of darkness beneath the nearby trees – it reminded me of the repulsive landscape described by Robert Browning in his dream-like quest-poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, where the grass grows ‘as scant as hair in leprosy’, and rats shriek like babies   I felt frightened If I’d seen anyone else standing or walking in the precincts of the Tower, I’d have panicked and run There was no one Perhaps that was more ominous In Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum, a taxi driver admits to the narrator that at night he always feels compelled to accelerate past the Eiffel Tower because it scares him Why? ‘Parce que … parce que ça fait peur, c’est tout’ I too felt that fear – and couldn’t remain an instant longer So I rapidly retraced my steps to the rue de l’Université, spooked by the thought of the Tower rearing up implacably behind me I felt as if a layer of skin had been scraped from my back beneath my neat, black rucksack and thick clothes   Turning into the avenue de La Bourdonnais I slid into a dark dreamscape: a handgun lay on the doorstep of a building to my left; solid, geometric, shocking It must have been dropped on the stone step by someone running up the avenue, or tossed from a passing car I tried to remember the emergency number as I pictured the man who had left it… then imagined him returning for it