Reflections on a Paris Left Behind

Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times

Resting near the Iéna bridge.

Even Hemingway struggled with this city, working on a memoir of his poor early days, "A Moveable Feast," off and on for years, before it was finally published after his death. Christopher Hitchens once called it "an ur-text of the American enthrallment with Paris," identifying an unthinking nostalgia "as we contemplate a Left Bank that has since become a banal tourist enclave in a Paris where the tough and plebeian districts are gone, to be replaced by seething Muslim banlieues all around the periphery."

Sometimes, reading about Paris in newspapers, magazines and on Web sites devoted to tourism, I feel the clichés piling high enough to touch the Eiffel Tower — or even the still-hideous Tour Montparnasse, which for decades has given skyscrapers a bad name here.

All the clichés are still there, if that's as far as you're willing to look, from the supposedly haughty waiters to the baguettes and croissants and the nighttime lights on the Notre-Dame de Paris, shimmering with a faith now largely abandoned.

After more than five years living here as The New York Times's Paris bureau chief, having experienced some of the best and worst, from a state dinner at the Élysée to a long, cold march down a blocked highway to Orly airport during one of France's many strikes, I leave with regret, softened by a return to a more cosmopolitan London than the city I left 25 years ago. We all try to make our own Paris, of the flesh and of the mind. As the Canadian Morley Callaghan once wrote, "it was a lighted place where the imagination was free."

But to live and work in a place forces you to love it differently, with more will and less passion. One of the other great foreign chroniclers of Paris, Mavis Gallant, once described the Paris sky as having the look and consistency of wet gray felt. And the narrow sidewalks on the Left Bank are charming until you nearly break your ankle trying to dodge a phalanx of Parisiennes gesticulating with cigarettes.

But even if social critics like André Glucksmann can rightly mock the place as a "musée doré," a gilded museum, Paris remains a fertile place for the imagination, for a transporting of soul into a setting both familiar and still different enough to matter. At the end of every vista you'll no longer find the gallows that Edmund Burke decried during the French Revolution, but the prospect of pleasure. If you can afford it, of course.

If the British understate everything ("quite good" = disappointing), Parisians overstate. J'adore is a false friend. So is magnifique and superbe. And even "cool"; cool Parisians know in their heart of hearts that they live in a rather staid, bourgeois island of wealth, surrounded by the ring road, or Périphérique, which is a kind of Berlin Wall — or ghetto wall.

There are parts of Paris that are "cool," to be sure, but not the way London is, or Berlin, or even Amsterdam. Paris is a city of the well-to-do, mostly white, and their careful pleasures: museums, restaurants, opera, ballet and bicycle lanes. Bertrand Delanoë, the Paris mayor since 2001, is a Socialist Michael Bloomberg — into bobo virtues like health and the environment and very much down on cars.

Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker writer, finds "the Parisian achievement" to have created, in the 19th century, two concepts of society: "the Haussmannian idea of bourgeois order and comfort, and the avant-garde of 'la vie de bohème.' " While these two societies seemed to be at war, he suggests, in fact they were "deeply dependent on each other."

Today, however, the balance is gone, and Paris is too ordered, too antiseptic and too tightly policed to have much of a louche life beyond bourgeois adulteries. In that sense, something important has been lost.

Its history is one of sex and blood, of revolution and insurrection, the guillotine and the Communards, the regicides and infanticides, the foreign occupations and those who made their peace with the occupiers. Frederick Brown, an American historian, caught something important about France's tumultuous confrontation with modernization in the 19th century when he contrasted the two competing symbols of Paris on two competing hills — the Eiffel Tower, that exemplar of the secular industrial age, and the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, built as a national penance for the moral decline and sanguinary excesses of the Paris Commune of 1871.

Steven Erlanger recently became The Times's bureau chief in London after five years as bureau chief in Paris.

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