A car burning between pont des Arts and the Louvre, on quai du Louvre. In May of 2000, I was riding my bicycle along quai de Gesvres on the Right Bank of the River Seine, near place du Châtelet. All of a sudden, way off in the distance, I saw a huge cloud of thick, black smoke rising in the air. The ball of smoke was too large to be coming from a tourist boat, or anything else I could imagine, so I took off, pedaling as fast as I could, towards where the smoke was rising from. And this is what I found…