Benvenuto Cellini went to Paris, too, although his means of arrival was rather less graceful than what I hope, by the time you read this, will have been my own effortless descent from the skies into the Aeroport Charles de Gaulle.
In Cellini's case, according to his autobiography, "When the muleteer arrived, we loaded all our goods upon a little cart, and then set off towards Paris, and before long we found ourselves at the Court of the King at Fontana Belio", this being Cellini's way of saying Fontainebleau.
Cellini performed his artistic wizardry for King Francis I in France from 1540 to 1545, and it was there that he noticed a personal quality that seemed to border on the paranormal. In his own words, "I became aware of it in France at Paris; for the air in those parts is so much freer from mist that one can see it there far better manifested than it is in Italy."
The phenomenon was this: "An aureole of glory has rested on my head. This halo can be observed about my shadow in the morning from the rising of the sun for about two hours, and far better when the grass is drenched with dew." It is, Benvenuto continued, "perhaps the most remarkable circumstance which has ever happened to anyone. I relate it in order to justify the divinity of God and of His secrets, who deigned to grant me this great favour."
Meteorologists, alas, have a more mundane explanation for Cellini's halo. They view this account as a rather good description of the hiligenschein, a very noticeable brightness surrounding the shadow of the head, which occurs when the early-morning sun casts along shadow on the dewy grass.
Drops of dew are like little spheres of water. They act like lenses, and rays of sunlight falling on them come to a sharp focus just behind the drop, on the surface of a blade of grass.
When we look at the dew-drop from a certain angle, the water again acts as a lens to allow us to see this shining image very clearly, and the geometry of the ensemble is such that we can only see this image when our eyes are pretty much on a line between the sun behind us and the drop of dew.
This, of course - almost coincidentally - is the position which allows the shadow of the head to appear just beside the drop in question. It was the amalgamation of a myriad such images that created the halo around the shadow of Cellini's head, or anyone else's.