Finally, you'd come to the scrubby landscape that follows flowering trees and one last farmworker under the lowering sky. There are places where the earth caves in. I know of people who gather dandelion greens in a churchyard off the Avenue de Clichy. The bitterness is then cooked out by boiling them for hours in big kettles over a gas flame. The masonry workers refurbishing Notre Dame's towers uncovered pigeons' nests in the cornices. The apprentice holding the baby birds in his rough, red hands shouted for joy, and the foreman of the crew, smoking a clay pipe, hardly blinked an eye. Around them flew steeple martins and swallows, not so often sighted now that the city's fumes cloud the sky. But the sky will prevail, the birds will be back, and the old woman with her walking stick, the beggar with his pocketbook, will both live on among the dizzying and so thoroughly human structures of glass and stone claiming the earth in the name of geometry. Delicate mosses will still grow on cleaning brushes left to the dampness of the sink. How good it is to walk through Paris as if it were a village. Our hearts will be moved by the last small-time shoemaker living on the highest floor of some future skyscraper, putting on his glasses to watch the sun go down. On Sundays he will take refuge in Pere Lachaise, by the huge tombs of field marshals, but when he dies, when no more shoemakers of his kind are left, he will be remembered by a flower, a specific grass, found deep in a dictionary bearing his name.
All the girls crossing the Place de l'Opera, the clever and lovely ones, the slow ones with such beautiful eyes, know what is eternal here. They know it in their blood, their bones, the membranes they carry lightly to their graves. This is what Paris teaches us: the sky and the earth are meant to last.