The guidebooks describe the pleasures of sightseeing in Paris, typically under sunny skies, but ignore the cold, gray, back-aching shuffle through the crowds of the kind that longtime resident Ellen Labelle experienced while visiting Montmartre with friends.

Responding to France Revisited’s call for an opinion article from various opponents to Paris City Hall’s push to approve the construction of a 180-meter (590-foot) high-rise known as the Triangle Tower, Patrice Maire, president of the association Mont 14, stepped up to the plate with “Will Paris Be Modernized or Disfigured?”

One doesn’t usually think of this low dense city having much in the way of a skyline, but Paris is now in the well advanced planning stages for the most significant changes to the city’s architectural profile in 40 years.

I’d received a letter written in a strange hand inviting me to taste some baked pineapple at one of the tents of the Christmas market near the bottom of the Champs-Elysées. Odd! I went to [...]

Stephane Jaspert picks the cobblestone up from his desk and says, “Tourists often see Paris as a light and romantic city, but it’s a tough city, hard as rock.” We are high above the cobbled streets of Montmartre in Mr. Jaspert’s garret.

John M. Edwards thinks the most exotic experience Americans have in Paris these days is ordering macaroons in a Piere Hermé boutique. But John remembers a time in the 1990s when, between girlfriends and apartments, Paris still rhymed with bewildering encounters and doomed relationships.

…As I turned to walk up rue Saint Merri in the Beaubourg Quarter of Paris I was surprised to see that the entire wall of a 5-story building was covered with the image of a face of a man with a finger to its lips. The man was calling for quiet. He had Dali eyes.

In this prequel to a bar, restaurant and hotel review, the author encounters an Italian, three Kazakhstanis and an impatient French woman, all because the route to Shangri-La is paved with good intentions.