Letter to his Mother

If any person wants to be happy I should advise the Parc. You sit drinking iced drinks and smoking penny cigars under great old trees. The band place, covered walks, etc., are all lit up. And you can't fancy how beautiful was the contrast of the great masses of lamp-lit foliage and the dark sapphire night sky, with just one blue star set overhead in the middle of the largest patch. In the dark walks, too, there are crowds of people whose faces you cannot see, and here and there a colossal white statue at the corner of an alley that gives the place a nice artificial, eighteenth-century sentiment. There was a good deal of summer lightning blinking overhead, and the black avenues and white statues leap out every minute into short lived distinctness.

- Robert Louis Stevenson, Letter to his Mother (1872)