and the softness of Anjou, from the wild horses of the mountain plateaux of the Spanish border and the pink flamingos of the Camargue to the storks nesting on the rooftops of Alsace and the seagulls wheeling over the vast D-Day invasion beaches of Normandy no country of comparable size, perhaps not even those of much greater size, can equal such variety of landscape and life. Its capital offers an unparalleled range of architecture, history and personal memory, from the Roman relics of the Arnes de Lutce to the Renaissance mansions of the Marais around the Place des Vosges, through Baron Haussmann's nineteenth-century construction of a city centre, and on to the legacy of steel, glass and concrete bequeathed by Franois Mitterrand. Its most popular attraction, the Centre Georges Pompidou in the Beaubourg district, lured five times as many visitors as originally planned, and had to close for two years to repair the resulting wear and tear. It has some of the most famous monuments and open spaces in the world the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde and the Bois de Boulogne. But it also has a uniquely private aspect with its courtyards, alleyways, hidden buildings and concierges who long ago learned that information was power. From China to Argentina, cities in search of glamour call themselves the `Paris of the East' or the `Paris of the Americas'. Though London's rebirth as the most lively city in the world hits magazine covers once a decade, it is Paris which clocks in with unbeatable regularity in the top league of the world's most beautiful and exciting capitals. Despite all those tales of outrageously priced cups of coffee on the Champs-lyses, it is not among the most expensive to visit; and its famously abrupt inhabitants are as likely to be in a hurry as rude. There is something pretty obnoxious in the advertising slogan of Poland's airline for Warsaw as a place of `quaint little Parisian ca...
