Walking here from my hotel on this night was unusually sensual. The rue du Cherche-Midi cuts straight through the heart of St-Germain—beginning a stone's throw from Paris's second-oldest church, the église de St-Germain-des-Prés. As we passed, organ music seeped out of its enormous double doors, and Eurydice and I slipped in for a spell of sonorous ecclesiastical music and an intoxicating amount of incense. The église de St-Germain has a young and plainspoken new priest who draws unusual crowds of revelers in their twenties and thirties. Its painted oak pillars and oddly woody interior bring to mind an Alpine lodge as much as they do a church; it is easily the coziest religious structure in town. Outside its doors are storefronts still cozier, their inhabitants selling cuckoo clocks and colorful sweaters.

We wound our way past the Café de Flore, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir did much of their best writing—each stationed at one end of the second floor and ignoring the other, one of many examples of innovative French love affairs. From there we passed onto the stately rue de Rennes, overhung tonight with millions of twinkling blue lights in the form of galactic spheres. I remembered the slogan of a recent exhibition on the death of God at the Centre Pompidou, Paris's premier museum of modern art. "Eat the Sky," read the posters. "Eat the Sky," said the T-shirts. It struck me at the time that this captured handily the worldview of the Parisians I knew: God is dead; cuisine is king! Heaven's passed onto the dinner plate.

On this evening, at least, the firmament indeed looked good enough to eat. I wished for a knife and fork to plunge into the cool candy planets, the vast blueberry orbs. Everything in Paris seems to glow blue this season. The Eiffel Tower, too, shines sapphire after dark—when it does not glitter, as it does once an hour, a starry white.

The quotidian beauty of Paris is the reason I resolved to live here years ago. I came for a love affair with a Frenchman, but I stayed for the geography of inspiration. It struck me that a city can offer little better than aesthetic arrest every time you traverse it. Whatever the state of French politics, (for a person like me—a writer, a romantic, a loner—beauty has no equal and no price. And between the cobbled stone underfoot and the flickering light show above, the spired churches and the lanterned stone bridges, the jewel box-like boutiques and the wonderful fish and fowl and meat terrines awaiting us for dinner, beauty was all too much in evidence.

The people of Paris are part of its beauty. My nearest neighbor at Les Terrines de Gérard Vié is a knockout: black-haired, porcelain-faced, as thin and curvy as a reed in the wind. I'd have thought her a fashion model. She laughs: No, she's a mother—of three. Where are they, I ask, the three? Day care, she says. At 8 p.m.? Sure, many day cares remain open till nine or nine-thirty; hers is right next door. Paris is jam-packed with day care centers. State-supported and inexpensive, they are available to many.