Paris sketches-Paris? Explore it on foot

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Paris is a compact city, worth a good walk, just as your feet tire, your soul gasps. It is easy enough to get lost in Paris but, like in Venice, it's a benediction. Even in the boulevardier Paris from architect baron Haussmann, since his passion for vista gives rise to a great quantity of extremely-sharp-angles street corners, which can make you feel lost like a mouse in a mosaic of slabs of cheese, but can also hide small shifts of direction in the pattern of a walk, leading you off course. Tall old houses in narrow ancient streets clutter and lean in on each other like drinkers over-filling a bar, not quite all falling over. Once your eye has acquired the habit, there is plenty to notice: the grills round the trees, the stray café chairs that block all but the narrowest passageway. The indentations marked with pictograms to encourage dog-owners to get their dogs to their doggy business in special reserves in the gutter. The rolls of old carpet used to divert the morning rivers that flow down these gutters. And as for the gutters themselves, they are frequent, alarmingly gaping mouths of drain-holes, which can be visited: the sewers of Paris are a popular tourist attraction.