Reflections on a Paris Left Behind

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…