It's difficult to imagine Paris's most famous and elegant boulevard, the Avenue des Champs-Elyseés (map), as marsh and meadowland, but so it was in the early 1600s before the first road was laid out northwest from the Tuileries.

Trees were planted along the main meadow in this district, earning the quiet, cool, serene area the name "Elysian Fields" in 1667. A century later the road was extended, but by 1800 this was still a wildish forest with only a few houses. British, Prussian and Russian soldiers camped beneath its trees after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (1812).

With the invention of gas lighting, the Avenue des Champs-Elyseés was transformed: fountains and footpaths made it a favorite place to go, see and be seen, whether on foot, on horseback, or in a horse-drawn carriage.

By the mid-1800s the first cafés-dansants had been opened, restaurants followed, then grand Second Empire houses and shops.

You must see the Avenue des Champs-Elyseés, but perhaps not all of it at once, as it is nearly 4 km (2.5 miles) from Place de la Concorde northwest to Place Charles de Gaulle-Étoile (map).

As you can see from the photo, the Champs-Elyseés is busy with traffic. What you can't see is that the sidewalks are equally crowded. Most days, the avenue is a throng-scene of Parisian life in every possible way.

Café-sitting is an active experience, not a particularly restful or serene one. (For that, seek out one of Paris's marvelous parks or gardens.)

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