Before Paris fully wakes, the Seine runs through it in silence — the stone quays still dark, the bridges holding the empty sky in their arches, the river surface catching the first light before anything on the bank is ready to receive it. Dawn on the Seine has a specific color sequence: the deep blue of the pre-dawn water shifts toward slate, then silver, then a pale gold as the sun clears the eastern rooflines of the Haussmann boulevards that define this city's horizon — a palette that changes by minutes and then is gone. The quays along the central Paris reach were largely built in the 19th century and have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991, a designation that, however bureaucratic it sounds, simply acknowledges what every dawn photographer in the city already knows: the river and the stone that contains it are one of the most coherent urban achievements in the world. This image was made in the window between the river's full dark and the full arrival of morning light, the water between those two versions of Paris.