Paris Éternelle

I remember Paris. Not Paris of Troy, but Paris, the city of love—the city we all love, even when her mood turns grim on winter days.

Paris has seen and been the stage of much change; I’ve always been there to witness it all. I’m not sure who I am, but I know who she is. I know her every street and corner, from the vast and damp catacombs to the most minute inscriptions on the cross perched at the top of the Sacré-Coeur, her most passionate lovers and her greatest enemies; sometimes, it’s hard to discern where I end from where she begins.

My first every memory was of her birth, as a river settlement, about two-thousand three hundred years ago. It was fairly humble—a Gallic fort, a few bridges, all built by Parisii settlers on the quaint Île de la Cité. Her skilled inhabitants made use of her winding river to trade with other nearby settlements and soon enough, their efforts recompensed, allowed her to begin minting her very own gold coins.

In time, she became worthy of a name: “Lutetia”. But with a name comes a certain regard, a sense of importance, and not a moment too soon was she the target of conquest. Lutetia had only felt peace and prosperity until tasting her first drop of blood.

For eight long years, Julius Caesar's legions carved their way through Gaul, and I watched as my beloved Lutetia trembled at their approach. When they finally came in 52 BCE, she fought—oh, how she fought—but Roman might proved too great. I remember the day she fell, not with the clash of swords or screams of defeat, but with the quiet dignity of survival.

The Romans, ever practical, saw her potential. They drew their straight lines across her curves, built their forum on her Left Bank, their baths, their amphitheatre. Little did they know that she was civilizing them instead, teaching them the gentle art of loving a place until it becomes home.

But peace, as always with her, was fleeting. By the time they called her "Paris"—a name that tasted strange on my tongue at first but grew sweeter with time—the Romans' grip was already weakening. I watched as she retreated to her island heart, the Île de la Cité, while Germanic shadows lengthened at her borders. The Roman city on the Left Bank emptied, stone by stone, like wine from a broken amphora. Yet even in retreat, she remained defiant, wrapping herself in new walls, in new faith.

I remember the day they brought Saint Denis to Montmartre—then just a humble hill, not yet crowned with its chalk-white basilica. They took his head, but the stories say he picked it up and walked. Paris has always loved such tales of the impossible, of death defeated by sheer stubborn will. Perhaps that's why she's survived so much herself.

 They called the hill Mons Martyrum after that—the Mount of Martyrs—though I still recall when it was nothing but windswept grass. How many times have I climbed its heights since then? How many sunsets have I watched paint the city gold from that vantage point? Even now, when tourists crowd its steps and artists hawk their portraits in the square, I sometimes see the ghost of that lonely hill, and of the saint who blessed it with his blood.

But it was the Northmen who truly tested her mettle. Vikings, they called themselves, though Paris had other names for them—none quite so polite. They came in their dragon-prowed ships in 845, and again, and again, like waves wearing at a stone. I remember 885 most clearly: for two years they besieged her, thinking her ripe for plunder. But Count Odo rallied her people, and Paris showed them what she was made of. She had grown since her days as a humble river settlement—grown proud, grown strong.

Then came the season of stone flowers: Notre-Dame rising from the river like a prayer made solid, her twin towers reaching for heaven while her flying buttresses spread like angels' wings. I watched each block laid, each gargoyle carved, each rose window pieced together like frozen sunlight. Two hundred years it took, this labour of love, this symphony in stone. Sometimes I think I can still hear the masons' chisels, the architects' debates, the first tentative notes of the earliest choir to sing beneath those vaults.

But Paris was never content to remain still. Even as Notre-Dame's shadows fell across the Seine, the Left Bank buzzed with new life. The university drew scholars from across Europe, their disputes and discoveries echoing through narrow streets that still bear the marks of their passing. Latin chatter filled the air, mixed with the smell of ink and parchment and the dreams of young minds seeking wisdom.

Kings came and went, each leaving their mark: Philip Augustus with his fortress Louvre, Saint Louis with his Sainte-Chapelle glowing like a jewel box, Charles V transforming the fortress into a palace. Each thought they were shaping Paris, but Paris was shaping them, teaching them her rhythms, her moods, her endless capacity for reinvention.

Through it all, I watched her people—my people, perhaps—suffer and shine in equal measure. When the Black Death came in 1348, I wandered her streets as they piled high with corpses, listening to the constant toll of church bells and the wheels of death-carts on cobblestones. Half her children vanished in those dark months, yet still she endured. Paris has always been a survivor.

The centuries rolled on like the Seine's waters, each bringing its own tribulations and triumphs. Religious wars tore at her fabric—Catholic against Protestant, neighbour against neighbour—until good King Henry IV decided Paris was worth a mass. He built her the Pont Neuf, which still stands today, no longer new but eternally elegant. He gave her the Place Royale, now the Place des Vosges, where aristocrats once promenaded under perfect arcades.

Then came Louis XIV, the Sun King himself, who both glorified and abandoned her. He built his palaces and grand boulevards before taking his court to Versailles—as if Paris could be dimmed by his absence! But she simply reinvented herself again, as she always does, becoming something new: a city of ideas.

I haunted the salons where Voltaire's wit sparked revolutions of thought, the cafés where Diderot and his fellow philosophers dreamed of enlightenment. I watched as these dreams turned to fire in 1789, when the people stormed the Bastille and the streets ran red with revolution.

The Revolution devoured Paris like a fever, and soon it began to devour its own. First fell the King himself, Louis XVI—the crowd had a different name for him then, Citizen Capet—in January 1793. I remember the silence that fell over the Place de la Révolution when the blade dropped. Even the drum beats stopped. Paris held her breath, as if realizing that once you've killed a king, nothing is sacred anymore.

Marie Antoinette followed in October. Her hair had turned white in her prison cell; I'd watched it happen, day by day in the Temple. The same crowds that had once thrown flowers now threw insults, but she kept her eyes fixed ahead, as if seeing beyond the blade to some distant horizon I couldn't glimpse.

Between these royal deaths, Olympe de Gouges wrote feverishly, as if racing against time itself. She dared to declare that women, too, were citizens, that they deserved to mount the speaker's podium as well as the scaffold. When they came for her in November, she faced them with the same courage she'd shown in her writings. They killed her for dreaming too boldly, for seeing too far. Her last words were lost in the crowd's roar, but I heard them: "Children of the Fatherland, you will avenge my death." They didn't.

Then came Danton in April 1794, his voice that had once stirred thousands now calling out his final jest to the executioner: "Don't forget to show my head to the people. It's worth seeing." And finally Robespierre himself in July, his shattered jaw bound in dirty linen as he faced the same blade he had used to remake the world.

The tumbrils rolled through streets I'd known as cowpaths, as Roman roads, as royal processionals. The Place de la Révolution became an altar to death, where the guillotine's shadow stretched longer with each passing day. I still see it sometimes, when I cross what is now the Place de la Concorde—that terrible geometry of blade and basket, the crowd's hot breath in the cold morning air.

Paris ran red—not just with blood, but with madness. I remember the carts piled with bodies, the Seine running thick, the drums beating day and night until the rhythm became the city's heartbeat. The Revolution devoured its children until there were no children left to devour.

When it was over, Paris was changed. Not just in names and structures—though they changed too, streets and squares rebaptized to erase all memory of royalty—but in her soul. Something ancient had been torn away, something new and terrible born in its place. Yet still she survived, as she always has, wearing her scars like jewellery.

Those drums that had heralded death became trumpets of glory when Napoleon rose from the Revolution's ashes. I saw him first as a thin young general, hungry and brilliant, and then as Emperor, growing rounder as his dreams grew grander. He wanted to make Paris into a new Rome, and for a while, it seemed he might succeed.

He carved triumphal arches through her flesh—the great Arc de Triomphe rising like a stone giant, the smaller Arc du Carrousel standing guard before the Louvre. Her old medieval streets rang with the boots of his Grande Armée, and from every new monument, eagles stretched their bronze wings toward conquest. Paris preened under his attention, even as she held her breath, knowing perhaps that such glory couldn't last.

And it didn't. I watched him leave for the final time, the man who would make Paris the capital of Europe trudging away to exile. But the city he left behind had changed—grander, more imperial, more conscious of her own majesty. Even in defeat, Paris had won something: a new understanding of her own grandeur.

But it was Baron Haussmann, under Napoleon III, who gave her the face she wears today. I witnessed the wholesale destruction of my medieval warren of streets, the narrow alleys where revolution had bred now broadened into boulevards. The wide boulevards, the elegant apartment buildings with their cream-colored stone and wrought-iron balconies, the careful geometry of parks and squares: this too was Paris, reinventing herself once again.

Then came the years of light and shadow. The World's Fair of 1889 brought forth the Eiffel Tower, that iron lacework giant that so many called an eyesore. I watched Gustave Eiffel defend his creation with the passion of a father protecting his child. How they mocked her, calling her an industrial cage thrust into our classical skyline. But like Paris herself, the Tower had a way of converting her critics. Year by year, she became less an intruder and more a guardian, her iron bones settling into the city's flesh until we could no longer imagine Paris without her silhouette.

The Belle Époque bloomed around her feet: the Moulin Rouge's windmill spinning tales of pleasure and excess, Montmartre's cabarets spilling light and laughter into narrow streets. I lingered in Le Chat Noir, watching Toulouse-Lautrec sketch dancers with quick, fierce strokes, their bodies caught in moments of wild grace. In the gardens of the Luxembourg, ladies twirled parasols while poets argued over cups of absinthe, each believing they had finally captured Paris's essence in their verses.

But darkness came again, as it always does. The Great War transformed her boulevards into arteries of anxiety. Young men marched away singing, returned broken or didn't return at all. German bombs fell, but Paris endured. She had survived worse. The victory parades of 1918 swept through streets I remembered running with revolutionary blood, and once again Paris rebuilt, recovered, reinvented.

The years between the wars were a fever dream. Hemingway at the American Club, Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère, philosophers debating existence in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Paris has always attracted dreamers, but these were dreams of a different sort—wild, modern, untamed.

Then came the darkness I still find hardest to speak of. June 1940. The Nazi boots on her boulevards, the swastika fouling her ancient stones. I watched my Paris transform into something I barely recognized – not by bombs or battles, but by the quiet poison of betrayal. The changes came slowly at first, like a disease creeping through her veins. Yellow stars appeared on shop windows and coat lapels. Neighbours who had shared bread and wine for decades now crossed the street to avoid each other's eyes.

The Vélodrome d'Hiver—where I had watched crowds cheer for cyclists in happier days—became a chamber of horrors in July 1942. French police rounded up their own people, mothers clutching children as families destroyed other families. Over thirteen thousand Jews were crammed into that space without food or water. Their cries echoed off the walls while Parisians walked past, pretending not to hear. Some would say later they didn't know, but Paris knew. Paris always knows what happens in her heart.

The collaborators walked proudly down the Champs-Élysées, arm in arm with German officers, and the Hotel Ritz, where Coco Chanel dined with Nazi officials, stood like a glittering monument to moral bankruptcy. Yet beneath this surface of submission, another Paris pulsed with resistance. The catacombs, which had held our dead for centuries, now protected our living—Jews, resistance fighters, downed Allied airmen, all hidden in that labyrinth of bones. Women who had never held a gun learned to shoot, to plant bombs, to kill. Their lipstick and elegance became weapons of deception.

The Gestapo made their headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch, and I watched an endless parade of suspects disappear through those doors. The screams that echoed from its windows mixed with the casual laughter of officers enjoying their dinner. Torture and tea, terror and music – all became part of Paris's daily rhythm. Denunciations flowed like poison: a neighbour’s whispered word could condemn an entire family. Some did it for money, others for petty revenge, many for mere favour with the occupiers.

Yet still, there were moments of extraordinary courage. Librarians changed catalogue cards to hide Jewish authors, priests forged baptismal certificates, and doctors wrote false diagnoses to save their patients. The streets themselves became a battlefield of shadows—every café a meeting point for resistance fighters, every flower shop a drop point for messages. The Sorbonne's students passed intelligence hidden in their textbooks, while even the pigeons of Notre-Dame carried microfilm between resistance cells.

But perhaps most haunting were the empty apartments, the vacant shops, the spaces where people had simply vanished. Their neighbours packed away their belongings, moved into their homes, claimed their businesses – a quiet apocalypse of empty chairs at dinner tables and unclaimed children's toys. Some streets in the Marais, once vibrant with life, became ghost towns overnight.

Some say Paris was saved by her beauty, that even Hitler couldn't bear to destroy her. But I know better. Paris saved herself, as she always has. Her people fought in shadows, passed messages in boulangeries, hid those marked for death in centuries-old cellars. Even her stones seemed to resist, each cobblestone a silent witness, waiting for liberation. When it came, in August 1944, I wept with everyone else. Tanks rolled down the Champs-Élysées, but this time they brought freedom. The crowds surged around them like a river breaking its banks, and Paris breathed again.

But liberation brought its own darkness. Women accused of "horizontal collaboration" were dragged into the streets, their heads shaved, swastikas painted on their foreheads. Some were guilty, some merely desperate, some had traded their bodies to save their families – but Paris's judgement was blind in those fevered days. I watched former collaborators suddenly produce hidden resistance medals, while some true heroes slipped quietly back into ordinary life, carrying their nightmares in silence. She had survived occupation as she had survived revolution, plague, and siege. Her scars, as always, made her stronger.

Now, as I walk her streets in the early morning light, I see all her ages at once: the Roman town, the medieval warren, the revolutionary cauldron, the imperial capital, the occupied city, the eternal Paris. Her stones remember everything, just as I do. Every lover's kiss beneath a streetlamp, every shot fired in anger, every poem penned in a café, every dream realised or shattered against her ancient walls.

Sometimes, watching the sunset paint Notre-Dame's restored spire in gold, I think I finally understand who I am. I am not separate from Paris at all. I am her memory, her conscience, her endless capacity for rebirth. For Paris is not just a city of love, as tourists say. She is a city of memory, of survival, of perpetual revolution—not just in politics, but in art, in thought, in what it means to be human. And as the Seine continues its ancient journey through her heart, I remain, watching, remembering, knowing that whatever comes next, Paris will endure. She always has.