With a culture as stubborn and storied as the French culture, the impending change seems to be infiltrating more slowly in Paris. There are still a million cafes, and bakeries, and cheese shops, and French people chatting at Brasseries, and boats taking tourists up and down the Seine River.

But there’s a layer of dust over the city.

Graffiti is everywhere, on ancient walls and trains and shop doors. There is more garbage on the streets, carelessly tossed water bottles and wrappers—thrown by people who don’t care about beauty, and have no respect for someone else’s land.

Immigrant children gather in parks, oblivious to the people around them, speaking in their native tongues, not in school, ignored by the Parisians passing them by.

Streets once solely French are being taking over by immigrants, and new restaurants have the smell of curry mingling with baking baguettes.

I sat next to a Chinese student at a Vivaldi concert in an old church. I was amazed by the number of Chinese in the city taking in Monet, crème brûlée, and music. They seem to love Western culture. They're in Paris to eat it up. They want the clothes, the food, the art. President Chi was visiting while I was there. Long tables of his contingency sat in historic cafes eating elevated French food—cafes where Hemingway once sat and wrote. They secretly covet the culture they were taught to dispossess.

I found it all bizarre.

The monsters ruling the earth are trying to do away with Western civilization—all of our artistic accomplishments, the architecture, the literature, the food, the beauty. Maybe people like the Chinese are trying to scarf it down before it disappears.

Student protesters were encircled three deep by the French police, and while these naive students have no idea what they are protesting for, I hated to see their right to protest stifled in such a way.

There are no customs agents at the airports. A machine takes your picture and scans your passport. Right out of the book 1984.

The last days of ancient sunlight. Those words kept going through my mind in Paris. Immigrants drive taxis, secure famous art, run the shops. Things are changing—begrudgingly so.

Left, still, was the quintessential French waiter. No one will ever take his place, until all the restaurants serve food that tastes like curry.