All throughout Paris you can feel the vibrancy of its culture, its age, and its history. There is graffiti along the walls of century old buildings crying “vive la revolution”  or even “Robespierre for president.” Paris is old and there are catacombs and graveyards everywhere filled with her citizens, but she feels alive in a way that Atlanta doesn’t, for all that it’s a younger city. 

Past Notre Dame, alongside the Siene river you can see graffiti work like this — one even saying “are we really free?” 

Eugene Delacroix, the man who painted Liberty Leading the People, died in his home which has been preserved in Paris as a museum. I had the chance to go in on my last day in Paris and saw the draft painting of Liberty Leading the People. There are slight but discernible differences in its composition, between it and the finalized one presented in the Louvre. 

The Louvre may be the best known museum in Paris but there are dozens if not hundreds of them within the city — casually but definitively a part of Parisian history and culture. The metro connecting all of France has stops nearby or even at and named for these museums. 

My impressions of Paris were that it is a beautiful, lively place, filled with a deep thrumming culture of change and endurance. Revolution bleeds and breathes in its buildings and the veins of the metro connecting it to its historical sites, the Procope, Danton’s statue, the Louvre, Versailles, etc. Change and revolution but not without ties to what came before, and before and before — what is causing this change, what is the catalyst of this, the climax? The answers are around you, there to be seen and heard and touched and known, and alive still in Parisian culture and life.