With his usual unflagging optimism, Eric Hazan turns his gaze on the various changes—positive and negative, ancient and recent—that his city has undergone.

Paris is no longer what it was: that's certainly true, and fortunately so! What would never had been said had Paris stayed as it was in the days when Diderot went to daydream every evening on his bench at the Palais-Royal? Paris is a living organism that has changed endlessly since then and even before—here for the better, there for the worse. This book is a call to open our eyes and prick up our ears to take in the tumult of this untameable capital, from the ring road to the Place Vendôme, the market in Aligre to that of Belleville, tobacconists to bars, Balzac to Sartre: Paris, as Mallarmé said of Poe, "changed to itself by Eternity at last."