Are There Still Mysteries in Paris?

Surely not, in the world's most visited city! And yet: Why is the Louvre called the Louvre? Why do the upper stories of its 17th-century buildings tilt in? Why do even familiar streets feel so enticing, unknown? One thing is clear: So many of us return because the City of Light is really one of mesmerizing shadows.

-  ADAM GOPNIK

‘‘People will always tell you that Paris was better 20 years ago,” a lover of the city said to me once. And the thing is…this is always true. Roll back any period in the city’s history by 20 years and you will find a better period—at least, as judged by those looking back. Those of us who lived in the city in the 1990s, myself included, remember how beautiful its defiance of late modern values was at the height of the American imperium, when, after Paris had been dismissed for years by London and New York as a backwater, the millennium happened, and Paris won the night. Every big city shared its New Year’s celebration over CNN, but it was the Eiffel Tower, as it bubbled and shimmered like a glass of champagne, that emerged as clearly still the best and shapeliest and most radiant of all modern beacons. Paris, though down, was far from out.

But the 1990s city, as even I can recall, was a superficial-seeming place compared to the Paris of the early 1970s. That one was still rocking in the wake of the rebellions of May ’68, still incompletely cleaned and gritty with unresolved revolutions and repertory cinemas. You entered the Louvre by the back door, so to speak, without a grand and glaring pyramid, and the Marais was just rediscovered and reclaimed, but not yet unduly gentrified. The Rue des Rosiers, in the 4th Arrondissement, was still a distinctly Jewish street.