Head in the Clouds

So many of the things that tourists are encouraged to do in Paris involve exhilarating climbs and panoramic views. The Eiffel Tower, of course, is the most famous. A trip to the top is an exercise in patience as much as anything else, with long and slow-moving queues for the cash desks and the lifts followed by the undignified scrum for the best viewpoints on each level. It is worth it, though, to see far out to the city's boundaries and appreciate the unique architecture and spread of the place – all elegant domes and spires, broad avenues and the graceful spans of the bridges, populated with tiny people, cars and métro trains.

One chilly morning, years ago, my husband and I were near the front of the line for the first climb of the day up the bell tower of Notre Dame. Up and up into the frosty air we climbed, steadying ourselves with brief clutches at the cold stone walls. At the top the wind was bitter and cutting, but the resigned faces of the gargoyles and grotesques still looked out over the rooftops. Encountering them up close revealed how detailed the carvings were. Turning a corner brought us face to face with an enormous bell, encased in its own wooden frame and mercifully not in full chime, not even swinging gently as the stiff breeze blew, but taller than us and at least twice as broad. The scale of things out of the ordinary is what makes these ascents so memorable – life size statues and gigantic bells contrasted with the minute, toy-town city streets below, then the whole mass distorted perceptions reversed as you make your way down again.

A visit to Montmartre offers up a whole new series of elevated sensations. This part of Paris clings to the hillside, the buildings like barnacles on a ship's hull. You walk through a warren of narrow, steep paths, uneven cobbles ready to trip you, stairways leading to café terraces, front doors or simply just new streets and alleyways. At the highest point in the city sits the Sacre Coeur, the pure white basilica that teases you with glimpses of its huge dome and pinnacles from behind walls and chimney pots for miles around. You can walk around under the painted vastness of the turrets or descend into the still, dark quiet of the crypt, but the thing to do really is to go up onto the roof. The tiny staircases and narrow walkways make you feel as if you are tripping, cat-like, across the church eaves. Up there, where the pigeons make their home amongst the marble, you are up above the city smog and closer to the sun that makes this great, white, shining pearl place almost glow against blue skies. You forget the crowds below and the jostling of tired bodies in the cramped streets. Up here you can soar over the city, from the train tracks of the Gare du Nord and out over all the zinc, lead and stones falling away from you into the distance.

To get to Montmartre you might have taken métro line 2, which has a few raised portions of track. The trains snake their way up out of their underground tunnels and over iron viaducts, following the lines of the streets below with often sharp twists and turns. As you look into the windows of the apartments and offices clustered at eye level around the track, you can sometimes glimpse the rear train coaches bending back towards those at the head, performing astonishing feats of flexibility to negotiate the bends. For more spectacular sights line 6 is recommended, this being a public transport artery so endowed with good views that it once featured in an episode of the American series “ER”. If you ignore the crush in the carriage and look out, you are treated at one point to the sight of the Eiffel Tower as the train crosses the Seine. There is water below and buildings close in on you from each bank, but as you make landfall and cruise above the cars stuck in the traffic jams beneath you can still see the giant majesty of the Tower's iron frame. On some days they hold markets on a few streets under the line, stalls with all their fresh goods and vibrant chatter sheltering in the shadows of the tracks, with animation of some kind going on at every level.

Paris at ground level can be hectic, so it is no surprise that viewing it from up on high is so often recommended. To climb up is to inhale the whole city in one huge breath, then release a sigh as the vast beauty of it gradually becomes apparent in the panorama spread out before you. You grasp the essence of the place, so compact and intense on terra firma but expanded somehow from up on high, with every angle revealing a sight to behold, everywhere something to see. Time slows down as you go up. You don't have to worry about weaving through the crowds or negotiating the streets – it's all there in front of you and you can properly appreciate it. Your own particular place in it all, whatever that may be, ceases to matter. You can see the city functioning as a big, beautiful whole, a teeming mass underneath the serene calm of an enormous sky, with clouds so close you could reach out and touch them.