PERSONALITIES

God invented Parisians so that foreigners would be unable to understand the French.

—ALEXANDRE DUMAS

Actually, it was the people, the streets, the life that brought me back to the city of the Seine. Above all, the people. They make the streets; they make the life; they make Paris. It should be obvious, but it isn’t. “How,” Gertrude Stein once asked, “can foreigners say they like France but not the French? It’s the French who made the France they like—and keep it that way.”

—JOSEPH BARRY, The People of Paris