One day in 1971, a skinny young man lay down on a wire stretched between the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral. The priests called the gendarmes, who rushed up the three hundred and eighty-seven spiral stone steps to the roof. There they found themselves helpless. Any movement they might make to fish the intruder off the wire would endanger his life. The intruder ignored them. He rose to a standing position on the wire. He strolled back and forth along it. On bended knee, he saluted the air. He held the police at bay for three hours while people in the streets below, climbing trees and lampposts, waved their hats and shouted him on. A light rain fell. The young man juggled three clubs and then sauntered off the wire. He presented his wrists for handcuffs, and was led to the nearest police station. There the police, instead of charging him with trespassing and disorderly conduct, gravely shook his hand, clapped him on the back, and let him go.

The young man was Philippe Petit, the finest high-wire artist to have appeared in several generations. Since his début atop Notre-Dame, at the age of twenty-one, Petit has danced high over the earth in Vancouver, Jerusalem, and New Orleans. He has capered above aborigines in the outback, lumberjacks in Russia, and Picasso on his ninetieth birthday. He has traversed waterfalls, gorges, and valleys at various spots on the globe. He has even seriously considered crossing the crater of Kilauea, in Hawaii, but the park people in charge of it have discouraged him.

Tightrope walkers in a circus display their artistry from twenty to forty feet above a sawdust floor, usually without a net. Petit in his perambulations performs scores, even hundreds, of feet above water, earth, or pavement, without a net. That’s a big difference.

Petit is different. In a battered trunk in a small room on an obscure street in Paris—a room he still rents, although he is rarely there—Petit has squirrelled away his dreams: maps and pictures of eminences and promontories, skyscrapers and other buildings around the world he longs to conquer. He is drawn to the grandiose. In the trunk he has a picture and a model of Niagara Falls. He would like to cross it, slicing through the mists over the boiling cataract’s roar, a mile-long hike. He would like, too, to stroll over the Grand Canyon, with, because of his love of the theatrical, an opera singer or a saxophonist wailing eerily in the red dusk. And ascend from the Palais de Chaillot to the second story of the Eiffel Tower, across the Seine. He would like every performance to be a spectacle of beauty and poetry. On the places on the maps where he imagines walking he has drawn his symbol: a stick figure on a high wire strung between two posts.

Some of these ambitions will never be realized. Property owners and local officials are reluctant to give permission for such acts of bravura, even though Petit offers to indemnify them. “I have to convince people I will not die in their back yard or break their building,” he says. And the intricate walks require so much time for preparation and planning that they are wildly expensive. But Petit never gives up. Often, when permission is denied or would be impossible to obtain he performs illegally.

The most notable of his illegal acts occurred between the twin towers of the second-tallest buildings on the planet—the World Trade Center. On August 7, 1974, Petit set a record, still unsurpassed, for the loftiest walk over a city street. He surveyed the towers surreptitiously for several months beforehand. Three friends, including a photographer named Jean-Louis Blondeau, flew from Paris to help him. At the time, the top ten floors of the towers were being finished, and thousands of electricians, carpenters, and deliverymen flowed in and out of the buildings along with the office workers. No one noticed anything unusual about two young men—Blondeau and an accomplice—dressed in business suits who entered the North Tower late in the afternoon of August 6th, about the same time that Petit and the third friend, disguised as deliverymen, rode an elevator to the hundred-and-fourth floor of the South Tower, the topmost reachable by elevator, on their way to the roof with equipment concealed in packages marked “Electric Fence.” The equipment was a walk cable, tools, a walkie-talkie, and a twenty-eight-foot, forty-five-pound balancing pole, the last broken down into several lengths and labelled “Antenna.” After carrying the cable, which weighed four hundred and forty pounds, up a hundred and eighty steps, to the floor below the summit—itself no mean accomplishment—they hid until the sole guard nodded off.