Chasing the traces of a vanishing Paris

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University. His most recent books are “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” and “Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past.” What do you do when you see a place you love disappearing? How do you hold on to the best of it without simply becoming nostalgic? For the writer Luc Sante, that place is Paris, and the disappearance has been going on for a long time.