Paris today has become perhaps the foremost European example of that twenty-first-century phenomenon, the “museum city.” Not a city full of museums (though it certainly is that), but a city that has become in itself a museum, polished, preserved, gleaming, expensive. The historic center—the twenty arrondissements—is clearly rich; the poor, especially the many African immigrants, have been pushed into the insalubrious banlieux. The surfaces of central Paris’s stone buildings are pristine, thanks to a law that requires property owners to clean their buildings every ten years. Hotels are frighteningly pricey: gone are the shoddy little one-star establishments that littered even the nicer neighborhoods thirty or forty years ago. In 2022 the city was the most popular tourist destination in the world, with a travel and tourism sector worth $36 billion—and no doubt this figure has risen since then, as covid recedes into the distance. Across the channel, blowsy London has let herself go badly, with much of her Victorian fabric destroyed to make room for a grotesque array of postmodern excrescences. Paris has kept her elegance intact.

Paris has kept her elegance intact.

Ironically, this painstaking preservation makes it difficult for cultural tourists to envision the historic Paris of their fantasies: the Belle Époque metropolis of Proust, Zola, and Toulouse-Lautrec, or the earlier, burgeoning capital of Honoré de Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both of these Parises were dirty, stinking, and slum-ridden as well as glittering and urbane. The eminent historian and publisher Eric Hazan,