Adam Nossiter, The Times’s Paris bureau chief, first moved to the city at the age of 3 when his father, Bernard Nossiter, was assigned to cover the European economy for The Washington Post. He moved back in 1983, in 1999, and then in 2015, when The Times posted him there. We asked him to share his thoughts on a Paris transformed by the pandemic.

PARIS — Before Paris became a theme park for the global affluent, there was an older Paris I knew as a child, where sculpted horse heads announced butcher shops and you were likelier to find céleri rémoulade at the corner than $30,000 handbags aimed at tourists.

Echoes of that Paris have come back to me over the last month as the coronavirus stalked the city. It’s a paradox that the empty streets have made it easier to imagine Paris as a place where people actually live, and not just a polyglot destination for shopping and playing.