PARIS — It’s the season of flânerie, that urban pastime of liberation that comes with strolling.

The heat of the Paris summer is long gone; the dark and damp of winter has yet to descend. The late-afternoon sun wraps the city’s narrow streets, hidden gardens and stone monuments in cool, pale light. The shiny chestnuts struggle to cling to their branches. The streets belong to those who walk, no map in hand, no fixed destination in mind.

Paris is a comfortable city of visual delights, slightly smaller than the Bronx and much smaller than London, Berlin, Madrid or Rome. It can be walked from one end to the other in hours. Sliced by a river, with anchors like the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur, it is a hard place to get lost, at least for long.

I discovered the rewards of aimless Parisian walks years ago when I was researching my (unfinished) doctoral dissertation on Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the 18th-century writer and first street reporter of Paris.

He wandered on foot, recording the everyday habits and customs of people of all classes and professions: prostitutes and policemen, servants and street vendors, artists, beggars, greengrocers, washerwomen, criminals and priests.