The two main rival Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, signed a joint statement in Beijing on Tuesday that endorsed, in concept, a temporary government for the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in a grand show of unity brokered by China’s foreign ministry.

The statement supports the formation of a unified government for the two territories that all parties can agree on — a high bar to clear for two factions that have long been vehemently, sometimes violently, opposed. But it offers little about how such a government would be formed, or when. Smaller Palestinian groups also signed the statement.

For China, the agreement represents an opportunity to promote an image of Beijing as a peace broker and an important player in the Middle East.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, declared that “historic moments” were underway. Mahmoud al-Aloul, the deputy leader of Fatah, showered praise on China for standing beside the Palestinian people. Both men posed for photos with Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, in an ornate hall in Beijing.

Yet, for many Palestinians, without concrete steps to make the unity plan a reality, the gathering in the Chinese capital was little more than a performance — and one they had seen before.

“What happened in China isn’t significant,” said Jehad Harb, an analyst of Palestinian affairs. “There aren’t any indications that Hamas and Fatah intend to end the split between them.”

Hamas and Fatah have been deeply divided for years, each trying to present itself as the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people and wary that the other will undermine its power. Multiple past attempts to broker unity between the rival parties have resulted in joint statements and agreements, but all those efforts have failed.

Fatah dominates the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited authority over parts of the West Bank. Hamas, after winning Palestinian legislative elections, seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a brief civil war in 2007, and ruled there until the war with Israel began last autumn.

“These statements aren’t worth the ink needed to write them,” said Abd Al-Rahman Basem al-Masri, 25, a resident of Deir al Balah in central Gaza. “We’ve seen these things before, and we’ve lost hope in them.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has worked for years to deepen the division between Hamas and Fatah, seeing it as necessary to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, denounced Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, for agreeing to the accord, which he said would amount to nothing.

“Instead of rejecting terrorism, Mahmoud Abbas embraces the murderers and rapists of Hamas, revealing his true face,” Mr. Katz said in a statement. “In reality, this won’t happen because Hamas’s rule will be crushed and Abbas will be watching Gaza from afar. Israel’s security will remain solely in Israel’s hands.”

The meeting in Beijing came as Mr. Netanyahu said during a visit to Washington that conditions for a cease-fire deal with Hamas were “ripening.”

He told the families of hostages in a meeting on Monday that Israel was “placing very, very heavy pressure on Hamas,” leading the armed group to compromise on its position, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office.

The families of the remaining 120 living and dead hostages in Gaza have increasingly criticized Mr. Netanyahu as not doing enough to bring home their loved ones.

Mr. Netanyahu’s visit, which comes at a time when Washington is intensely focused on developments in the presidential campaign, has been criticized by many Israelis, who say he is leaving the country as it battles foes on multiple fronts.

Vice President Kamala Harris, a candidate for president, will meet with Mr. Netanyahu this week, her staff said on Monday, but she will miss the prime minister’s speech in Congress on Wednesday because of a previously planned event Indianapolis.

Typically, the vice president, as the president of the Senate, sits on the House rostrum beside the House speaker during joint meetings to receive a foreign leader, appearing just behind the visiting dignitary in a tacit show of support and welcome. Ms. Harris declined to preside during Mr. Netanyahu’s speech, which an aide to the vice president said should not be construed as a change in her commitment to Israel’s security.

Her meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, which has not yet been scheduled, will be the vice president’s first foreign-policy moment since President Biden stepped aside from the presidential election in November and Ms. Harris moved swiftly to secure her place at the top of the Democratic ticket.

White House national security officials have long stressed that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are in complete agreement about the situation in the Middle East and the fighting in Israel. But Ms. Harris has emerged as one of the leading voices for Palestinians in closed-door meetings at the White House.

The humanitarian straits of Gazans remain perilous as Israel’s military continues to hunt down Hamas militants. The military said on Tuesday it was pushing ahead with operations against Hamas in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, using tanks and fighter jets to strike what it said were weapons storage facilities and observation posts. That fighting came a day after aid workers reported that dozens of people had been killed and hundreds of others wounded in the area.

The military invaded Khan Younis in December, and by spring it said that it had dismantled Hamas’s command and control structure in the city. That its troops have returned there — just as they have returned repeatedly to Gaza City after routing Hamas there — shows that despite heavy losses, Hamas had not been fully defeated and still had some ability to regroup.

The Israeli military said on Tuesday that a projectile fired by Hamas toward Israel from the area of Maghazi in central Gaza “fell and hit a school in the area of Nuseirat,” a town in the same part of the enclave. The military did not say whether there were casualties, and it was not immediately possible to confirm the claim.

The situation was particularly dire at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Tuesday. The Gazan Health Ministry said that 73 people had been killed by Israel’s bombardment of the area on Monday, including 24 children. More than 270 others were injured, some severely, the ministry said. The figures could not be confirmed independently, and they do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Javid Abdelmoneim, the medical team leader of Doctors Without Borders at the hospital, said in an impassioned video posted on social media on Tuesday that staff members were at a breaking point because of the overwhelming medical needs, not least patients with burns. Stocks of blood were at critically low levels, he said, adding that he feared the hospital would be forced to close entirely.

Zixu Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong, Michael D. Shear from Washington and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem.

More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been abused by state and religious organizations in New Zealand that had been entrusted with their care, according to the final report from a landmark independent inquiry released on Wednesday.

The abuse included sexual assault, electric shocks, chemical restraints, medical experimentation, sterilization, starvation and beatings, said the report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Abuse in Care. Many of the victims were children who had been removed from their families and placed in state, religious or foster care.

“For some people this meant years or even decades of frequent abuse and neglect,” the report said. “For some it was a lifetime; for others it led to an unmarked grave.”

In a statement accompanying the release, Coral Shaw, the inquiry’s chair, described the abuse as an “unthinkable national catastrophe.”

The results of the investigation were presented to New Zealand’s Parliament on Wednesday.

“I cannot take away your pain, but I can tell you this: Today you are heard and you are believed,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told survivors at a news conference. “The state was supposed to care for you, to protect you, but instead it subjected you to unimaginable physical, emotional, mental and sexual abuse.”

Mr. Luxon said New Zealand’s government would formally apologize to survivors in November and he committed to implementing a redress process. He did not answer questions on Wednesday about how much he expected it would cost to compensate victims, but the inquiry indicated that the total could reach billions of dollars.

The inquiry, established in 2018 by the New Zealand government, involved interviewing nearly 2,500 survivors as it examined orphanages, foster care systems, mental health facilities and other forms of care that were charged with supporting 655,000 people from 1950 through 2019. The inquiry’s leaders described it as the widest-ranging examination of its kind in the world.

The report noted that most children in care were Indigenous Maori, even though the group makes up a minority of the country’s overall population of five million people, and said that “Maori were often targeted because of their ethnicity.”

Beyond the 200,000 people estimated to have been abused, the report said countless others had suffered neglect. “The true number will never be fully known as records of the most vulnerable people in Aotearoa New Zealand were never created or were lost and, in some cases, destroyed,” the report said, referring to the country in Maori and English.

The inquiry found that even when abuses by government and religious leaders were discovered, the leaders “were rarely held to account for their actions or inactions, which emboldened them to perpetrate further abuse.”

Among the inquiry’s 138 recommendations were calls for public apologies from the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, and New Zealand’s police commissioner and its top civil servant. It also urged the government to overhaul the country’s no-fault accident compensation program to provide tailored support for survivors of abuse.

The report prompted New Zealand’s Catholic, Methodist and Anglican churches to promise change. “We will ensure that action follows our review of the inquiry’s findings,” Steve Lowe, president of the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference, said in a statement. “We owe it to survivors,” the Anglican Church said in another statement.

The report follows decades of complaints from survivors. “Survivors repeatedly called for justice but were unheard, disbelieved, and ignored,” according to the report. “Significant resources have been used to deny survivors their voice and to defend the indefensible. This must stop.”

Oleksandra Nekipelova sat down at a desk in her apartment, lit a small candle and opened her computer to join a video call.

“Tell me, please, what would you like to talk about this time?” Ms. Nekipelova asked. Valeriia Korotchenko, her client, responded that she was feeling “fundamentally powerless against the war” launched by Russia on Ukraine. Near-daily Russian air attacks had made destruction and death a new normal in her life, she said.

“I lose faith that I will ever be able to live peacefully,” Ms. Korotchenko told Ms. Nekipelova, who lives in Lviv, Ukraine.

Ms. Nekipelova is a “death doula,” a professional whose job is to support and guide people who are coping with an acute sense of grief or facing death — their own or those of their loved ones. Unlike psychotherapists, death doulas do not typically try to fix mental health issues. They do not offer medical care or therapy. Instead, their work is focused on offering support and compassion.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, the work of death doulas has grown in Ukraine, a country where death has become a daily reality for many, whether through the distant news of a relative killed in battle or the not-so-distant thud of a missile smashing into an apartment building.

Courses have been introduced to train death doulas with the support of international and local organizations, although it remains an unregulated profession. There have been reports of a sharp increase in the number of clients, a trend that matches what health experts say is a growing need to provide psychological and emotional support to traumatized Ukrainians.

Working mainly by word of mouth, death doulas have helped the bereaved, but also people struggling with a more general sense of loss, such as those who have fled a home damaged by shelling or who long for the stable life they had before the war.

“There is a strong need for end-of-life conversations and supportive communities during times of war,” said Douglas Simpson, the executive director of the International End-of-Life Doula Association, or INELDA, which is based in the United States and has trained several Ukrainian death doulas since the war began.

Death doulas have proved crucial in Ukraine, where grief has long been seen as a personal struggle, complicating efforts to help the bereaved.

Several death doulas and their clients said the culture of refraining from talking about death and emotional suffering was a legacy of the Soviet Union, which emphasized enduring hardship rather than asking for help, something that could be perceived as a sign of weakness.

“People don’t know what to tell a person who has lost a loved one. They don’t know much about death or sorrow. This topic is a taboo,” Ms. Nekipelova said in a recent interview. “The role of a death doula is to provide a space for that person to talk about this.”

There have been many reasons for grief in Ukraine over the past two years. Nearly two-thirds of Ukrainians have a relative or friend who have died in the conflict, a survey conducted last year by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology showed. And millions — nearly a third of the population — have fled their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration.

“Because of the war, many people need support,” said Alla Savchenko, a founder of the Death Foundation, a training program based in Ukraine that started shortly before Russia’s invasion. A death doula herself, she said she had seen a 50 percent increase in her clients over the past two years.

Requests, she noted, have come not only from people who have lost a loved one, but also from people “who had to move to another country, who lost jobs,” what she described as “losing an important part of your life.”

Some people have also turned to death doulas to help them understand how to behave with bereaved relatives.

Take Valeriia Tereschenko, 35, a soft-spoken court worker. She contacted Ms. Nekipelova after her husband’s brother was killed in combat. His body was never recovered.

Ms. Tereschenko said her husband, a soldier, struggled to cope with the news and began drinking more alcohol and taking tranquilizers. Words of condolence did not help. The husband would calm himself by touching Ms. Tereschenko’s long black hair.

“I saw that I was losing my husband,” Ms. Tereschenko said, so she asked Ms. Nekipelova what to do. “She gave me a push to really listen to him,” she said, to accept his silences and wait for the moment when “he started talking.”

Death doulas, Ms. Tereschenko added, help to “know more about death, about all these stages of acceptance: mourning, denial, anger, then acceptance.”

Though many associate the term doula with someone who helps during birth, in recent years, more people have recognized the need for assistance at the end of life. That includes keeping them company, listening to their life stories or discussing their fears. The doulas and their clients can meet anywhere: in cafes, in a park, at home.

“We don’t set any goals for our clients, and we don’t push them,” said Yevhen Rybka, 25, a death doula. “Both dying and grieving are natural processes, and we’re just following up with this.”

Zarina Zheliaskova, 34, who became a death doula shortly after the war began, said that her contribution was “to create a space where people can express everything.” She described a typical session as a 50-minute discussion in which she does “only 5 percent” of the talking. “The rest is all about the client,” she said.

Ms. Nekipelova says she asks her clients few questions. “A person in grief doesn’t need to be told anything, but to be heard,” she said.

Tatiana Romanova-Pavlova, one of Ms. Zheliaskova’s clients, lives in Kharkiv, a northeastern Ukrainian city battered by Russian shelling. She said the taboo around death in Ukraine had not prepared Ukrainians to deal with the loss and grief associated with a war. “In our mentality, you’re sort of programmed to forget as soon as possible,” she said.

Ms. Romanova-Pavlova said people in mourning would often hear “phrases like, ‘Don’t cry,’ ‘It’s nothing serious,’ ‘You’ll forget everything soon,’ ‘You’ll find a new husband soon,’ ‘Everything will be OK.’ All of this is aimed at suppressing emotions,” she said.

Talking to death doulas is a way “to release” repressed feelings, Ms. Zheliaskova said. But she and other death doulas also pointed out that hearing about death all day could be hard to cope with their own loss. Both women have developed techniques to ease their minds, including taking long walks in parks and near rivers, hanging out in cafes and, perhaps most important, joking with friends.

“This is also very important, because if I just keep talking about death all the time, then I’ll lose the life that I want to give to others,” Ms. Nekipelova said.

“We have a joke with the doulas,” she added. “There’s the concept of work-life balance. We call it death-life balance.”

As tourists savored icy granitas under hibiscus trees and swam in the cool Mediterranean Sea, in the farmlands of southern Sicily, among hillsides so scorched they resembled desert dunes, a farmer watched recently as his cows headed to the slaughterhouse.

After months of drought, he didn’t have any water or food to give them.

“It’s devastating,” said the farmer, Lorenzo Iraci Sareri, as tears fell on his tanned face, lined by 40 years of labor pasturing cows. “I have never seen something like this.”

Parts of southern Italy and other Mediterranean regions, including Greece and southeastern Spain, are experiencing one of their worst droughts in decades. It is particularly devastating, experts say, because the lack of rainfall has been made worse by the higher temperatures caused by climate change.

Artificial basins where animals used to drink offer little but cracked earth. Wheat ears are small and hollow. Pergusa Lake in central Sicily, part of a natural reserve, resembles a pale, dry crater.

But for many of these regions, the summer is also peak season for tourism, a key economic lifeline that the authorities fear is being threatened by news of water scarcity, and that they are trying to protect.

“We are forced to sacrifice the damage to agriculture, but we have to try not to damage tourism because it would be even worse,” said Salvatore Cocina, the head of Sicily’s civil protection.

He added that agriculture still accounts for the vast majority of water use, with the general population using just a fraction of it, even when it includes millions of tourists during the summer.

The authorities said they prioritized providing water to hospitals, to businesses that produce key assets like oxygen, and to vulnerable segments of the population. But also to hotels.

“The tourists don’t notice” the drought, Elvira Amata, Sicily’s top tourism official, promised.

Outside five-star resorts, in the arid South of the island, the signs were everywhere.

In Agrigento, which overlooks a valley holding the ruins of several Greek temples, the authorities are rationing water. Some homes on the outskirts have not received any in weeks.

Water scarcity has meant that a small number of small bed-and-breakfasts also had to pull some rooms from the market, or redirect custumers to other hotels, said Francesco Picarella, the head of Federalberghi, Italy’s main hotels association, in Agrigento. But what hurt most were news media reports warning that tourists were “running away” because a lack of water, he said.

Since the reports started coming out, bookings dropped significantly, Mr. Picarella said. The region immediately responded by summoning officials and urging them to protect the tourist season.

The mayor of Agrigento, Francesco Miccichè, said the authorities were distributing water more frequently to the city center, where most bed-and-breakfasts are, and they have made truckloads of water available to hotels. Some still complain about having to pay for the truckloads, but most hotels now can provide water, Mr. Picarella said.

“In the luxury sector I can’t tell them to ration showers,” said Isidoro di Franco, the general manager of Verdura Resort near Agrigento, as he sat at the bar overlooking green golf courses and lush pink and blue ornamental plants.

He said that the resort was restricting water use, and recycling water, but that it could not cut back on basic necessities.

The regional government is planning an advertising campaign to counter fear of the drought. Sicilians insisted that southern Sicily was not only ready to welcome tourists, but also desperately needed them.

“If you take us away tourism too, we are going to die,” said Cinzia Zerbini, a Sicilian spokeswoman for Coldiretti, Italy’s biggest farmers association.

Many farmers are already desperate. One, in the hills near the southern Sicilian town of Caltanissetta, said his goats were drinking from basins so depleted that one of them had died as the mud dried in her stomach.

In northeastern Sardinia, the main lake is at a third of its capacity. A local government representative said officials had to make a choice between tourism and agriculture, and completely halted running water for irrigation.

“We decided to sacrifice agriculture,” said Giancarlo Dionisi, the local prefect of the Sardinian province of Nuoro. While farmers would be compensated for their losses, he said, the damage of having waterless hotels could last longer.

“If tourists who come can’t shower, they create a negative word of mouth,” he said.

Many in Sicily were so appreciative of the financial benefits brought by tourism that they did not object to water consumption by tourists during the drought. Others raised objections.

Some farmers said that the heightened attention on visitors in Mediterranean regions was enabling a kind of tourism in which local conditions are not taken enough into consideration.

“Locals are getting fractious,” Francesco Vincenzi, the president of the Italian association of agricultural water boards, said in a statement. “They feel threatened in the availability of a primary good like water.”

In the drought affected Spanish region of Catalunya, locals started a campaign called #NoEnRaja, which roughly translates to “you can’t take something from nothing.” They argued that together with agriculture and industry, the booming tourism sector was responsible for the mismanagement of scarce resources.

According to Barcelona’s institute of regional and metropolitan studies, the water consumption of the average guest at a luxury hotel is five times that of a resident, contributing to what the campaign called “the injustice in the use of water.”

In Portugal this winter, as reservoirs emptied, orange farmers complained that golf courses were still being watered.

“First come the people, then the golf courses, then you,” Pedro Cabrita, an orange farmer, paraphrased a local official as telling him.

Some officials have responded to the apparent imbalance. On the Greek island of Sifnos last year, the mayor called for a ban on the construction of private swimming pools. In Spain, a recent ban on refilling swimming pools included fancy resorts.

Samuel Somot, a researcher at Météo-France, the National Weather Service in France, said increasingly harsh Mediterranean droughts risked future desertification as well as “water wars.”

The problem is likely to intensify. Higher temperatures mean that animals and plants are thirstier while lakes and basins evaporate faster, said Luigi Pasotti, a director with Sicily’s Weather Service for agriculture.

This year, Coldiretti said that Sicilian farms lost over 50 percent of their wheat harvest on average.

In the southern region of Puglia, honey production dropped 60 percent because it was so dry that many plants could not flower. The olive harvest there was predicted to fall by half because of the drought.

In Sicily, the drought is now bringing longstanding water management problems to the fore. Large quantities of water are lost because of poor infrastructure. In Agrigento, that can be over 50 percent, officials said. Desalinators and wells were dismissed in the past.

The Italian government has announced it would allocate 12 billion euros, roughly $13 billion, to water projects. After years of hearing promises, experts are skeptical that the projects could be put in place anytime soon.

But the issue needs to be addressed fast, said Edoardo Zanchini, the director of Rome’s climate office. “Otherwise the agriculture lands will be abandoned,” he said, “and abandoned lands become deserts.”

The Bank of Italy said the output generated by agriculture in Sicily had dropped last year because of climate induced shocks, while tourism grew. Many farmers in southern Sicily said that they could not withstand another bad year.

“If we don’t get forage and we don’t get water we will have to slaughter them all,” said Luca Cammarata, a goat farmer near Caltanissetta, as he pushed his skinny goats toward the few green sprouts left on his yellow pasture. Another year like this would amount to a “death sentence,” he said.

“Should we all move to the coast and do tourism?” he asked.

There is a glorious folly to the Paris Olympics, the first in the city since 1924, as if France in its perennial revolutionary ardor took a century to ponder something unimaginable, the transformation of a great city into a stadium.

The heart of Paris has fallen silent in preparation for the opening ceremony on Friday, when a flotilla will usher thousands of athletes down the Seine, under the low-slung bridges where lovers like to linger. Not since the Covid-19 pandemic has the city been so still, or so constrained.

From the Pont d’Austerlitz in the east to the Pont Mirabeau in the west, roads are closed, newly built stands for spectators line the riverbanks, fences enclose sidewalks and residents need police-issued QR codes to reach their homes. The golden cherubs, nymphs and winged horses of the Pont Alexandre III gaze out on metal bleachers and posses of police.

The Olympic project is almost unthinkable in its audacity, and a major security headache, but then the Eiffel Tower would never have risen above Paris in 1889 if the many naysayers had prevailed. As it went up for the Paris World Fair, Guy de Maupassant called the tower a “giant hideous skeleton” that had driven him out of Paris.

Now, between its first and second floors, five giant Olympic rings — in blue, yellow, black, green and red — adorn the tower. They glow at night over the Champ de Mars park, where the beach volleyball competition will be held. Nearby flows the Seine, beautified at a cost of about $1.5 billion and clean enough, it is said, for several Olympic events, including two 10-kilometer swims and the triathlon.

Swimming in the Seine was banned 101 years ago. All things come to an end. These Games, at a cost of about $4.75 billion, were conceived to be transformative in a lasting, environmentally conscious way. “We wanted a dash of revolution, something the French would look back at with pride,” Tony Estanguet, the head of the Paris Olympics committee, told me.

Paris has seen its share of upheaval over the centuries. To walk its streets is to be accompanied by history and to be ambushed from time to time, even after many years, by some previously unnoticed inflection of beauty.

To be a “flâneur,” poorly translatable as a wanderer, is a particularly Parisian state, capturing the random meandering of the observer who is entranced by the city and its people. “America is my country and Paris is my hometown,” said Gertrude Stein, the novelist and art collector.

Wonderment is a common condition here. The way the light falls — on a golden dome, or through the leaves of the plane trees, or on the limestone walls of a handsome boulevard, or across the shimmering water of the Seine at dusk — stops visitors in their tracks. The City of Light is also the city of etched shadows ever redrawing its lines.

In summer, crowds of young people gather on the river bank. They drink wine and beer. They play music. Sightseeing boats glide past, carrying tourists who wave and are waved at. The sensual conviviality that has made “Paris” and “romance” inseparable words is palpable.

Among the revelers there is generally a reader or two holding a book, isolating earbuds in place, lost in solitary musing. Paris is a city where books are prized and authors celebrated in prominent posters and other ads that in the United States would be reserved for Hollywood movies.

It is also a city of formality and refuge. Quiet spaces abut architectural grandeur. You are never far from magnificence, perhaps most extravagantly illustrated by Napoleon’s tomb at the Hôtel des Invalides, but never far, either, from an unsuspected covered arcade, like the Passage Verdeau, that snakes from a Grand Boulevard into an intimate world. Hidden enclaves like the little St. Vincent Cemetery in Montmartre are part of the ever renewed mystery of the city.

Even in the approaches to the Grand Palais, built just off the Avenue des Champs-Élysées for the Paris World Fair of 1900, gravel paths lead through secluded greenery. The immense palace, with its classical stone facade and vaulted roof of iron, steel and glass, will host the taekwondo and fencing events. It seems a suitable setting for the saber.

A little farther down, at the Place de la Concorde, athletes in three-a-side basketball, break dancing (known in the Olympics as break) and BMX freestyle (motocross stunt riders) will compete for gold medals. Guests at the adjacent Crillon Hotel, the ne plus ultra of Paris luxury, may not be amused.

Of course, central Paris is not all of Paris. Much of the Games will take place in Seine-Saint-Denis, a densely populated neighborhood north of the city blighted by poverty, crime and the faltering integration of mainly North African immigrants, deprived of decent schools and opportunity.

It is also a vibrant melting pot and a testament to France’s growing diversity. The Olympic Village will be housed there, and a new 5,000-seat Aquatics Center. A clean river and a revitalized Seine-Saint-Denis integrated into a “Grand Paris” are two of the core aspirations of the Games.

They are noble ambitions, but in France seeing is believing. Clashes over immigration policy in places like Seine-Saint-Denis have been one of the factors poisoning French politics of late, leaving the country deadlocked and with no more than a caretaker government as the Games begin.

Of course, malaise is nothing new in France; in fact, it’s a French word for a long-term national condition.

I see this newly birthed stadium city through many-layered memory. There are places you come to at an impressionable age that will not leave you. Almost a half-century ago, I lived as a student in a tiny apartment at the bottom of the Rue Mouffetard on the Left Bank. I was studying French and giving English lessons three times a week in a high school in a southern suburb famous principally for its prison.

I would return in the early evening and wander around the Mouffetard market — the mackerel glistening on their bed of ice, the serried ranks of eggplant, the raucous invitations to buy the last of the silvery sardines for a song. Acrid smoke from Gauloise cigarettes swirled in the wintry air. My single window on the city offered inexhaustible distraction.

The smoke has gone, largely, from Paris and there are fewer bracing glasses of sauvignon blanc being served midmorning. English has made a devastating assault on French, with “le sharing” and “le bashing” among my recent least favorites.

Yet the unique texture of Paris endures — that web of zinc roofs and dormer windows and chimney pots and black-grilled balconies and peeling off-white shutters and cobblestone streets and gravel pathways and flat-topped pollarded trees and inviting bistros with names like Chez Ginette that make it easy for movie directors like Wes Anderson to long to be French, or even imagine they are.

Food still occupies a central place in Paris. Lunch remains an honored ritual, despite the encroachment of fast food. The advice of A.J. Liebling, the New Yorker writer and gourmand of Paris, remains useful: “Each day brings only two opportunities for fieldwork, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol.”

Nothing is more Parisian than the hill of Montmartre, topped by the white-domed Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, besieged by tourists taking as many selfies as photographs of the splendid panorama beneath them. Here the likes of Picasso and Modigliani lived, and here cyclists will climb repeatedly during the road cycling Olympic event.

The Rue Lepic winds down the hill. At one of its curves stands Au Virage Lepic, or the Lepic Bend, a small restaurant with tables set close together.

“What we need from the Olympics is gaiety!” said Maria Leite, the owner of the restaurant, who complained that business was way down as tourists shied away from the Olympics and accompanying restrictions.

Michel Thiriet, 78, a habitué of the restaurant, was lunching alone on steak tartare. I asked him if he was enthused by the Olympics. No, he said, echoing the sentiment of many Parisians who have fled what they see as the life-complicating takeover of their city. For Mr. Thiriet, it was all a form of “megalomania.”

He told me he was a retired movie cameraman. And what, I wondered, does he do now? “I am awaiting death with tranquillity,” he said. Fierce realism is another characteristic of a city that has seen it all.

A poll last week by IFOP, a market-research group, found that 36 percent of French people were indifferent to the Games and 27 percent anxious about them. That may well change once it all begins. The Olympics will usher an expected 11.3 million visitors through the history of France, to the Palace of Versailles for equestrian events amid the urns and statuary and formal symmetry of the Gardens, where French royals once disported themselves before being decapitated in the Revolution of 1789.

At the Hôtel de Ville, or City Hall, more elaborate than many a royal palace, the Olympic marathon will begin. It was here on Aug. 25, 1944, in a Paris just liberated from the Nazis, that Gen. Charles de Gaulle made one of his most memorable speeches. “Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris freed!” he said, before attributing the liberation to “the only France, the true France, the eternal France.”

Nearby, on the Île de la Cité, stands the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, its spire now replaced after the fire of 2019, but still encased in scaffolding as its restoration nears completion. Beyond it, at the east end of the island, is the Memorial to the Martyrs of Deportation, among them the 75,000 Jews killed in Nazi camps by the other France, that of the collaborationist Vichy regime, against which de Gaulle fought and of which he said nothing in his speech.

In some ways the very survival of Paris, marked at different times by religious wars, revolutionary terror and murderous hatred, is a miracle. In the small garden under the Pont Neuf, there is a plaque that commemorates the thousands of Protestants “assassinated because of their religion” in the city in August 1572. I never fail to stop there when I can.

From beneath the willows at the western edge of the Île de la Cité, which points its prow down the river, the city stretches away past the Louvre toward the faintly silhouetted hills of the suburb of St. Cloud. Many have asked, as many of the Olympic athletes no doubt will as they sail toward the Eiffel Tower and Trocadéro: What is this magical harmony of Paris?

It is grace and it is calm and it is consolation for the weary, but perhaps in the end it cannot be pinpointed, and that is of the nature of magic. “Fluctuat nec mergitur,” says the city’s motto. “She is rocked by the waves but does not sink.” With luck, the Olympics will raise Paris still higher and, in a world marked by wars, offer reconciliation and peace.

She travels the country in white, rosaries swinging from her neck. Women cry in her arms, men beg her for salvation. Stripped of her bodyguard last week by the government, she traversed the streets unprotected.

As she climbed onto the windshield of her battered car — her makeshift stage — supporters jostled to touch her. One passed her a hand-drawn portrait. Inside the frameless image, María Corina Machado was shielded by the Venezuelan flag and the arms of Jesus Christ.

“María!” yelled one supporter, “help us!”

Ms. Machado, 56, the newest leader of Venezuela’s opposition, has struck fear into the hearts of the country’s ruling party. In a matter of months, she has emerged from the political sidelines to build a powerful social movement capable of bringing thousands of people to the streets — and perhaps millions to the ballot box.

She is not the one running for president, but she is the driving force behind the main opposition candidate, a little-known diplomat named Edmundo González.

The mobilization Ms. Machado has catalyzed follows years of political apathy in Venezuela, where the government of President Nicolás Maduro has crushed protests and arrested dissidents, helping to spur an enormous exodus from the country.

An effort backed by the Trump administration to install a young legislator named Juan Guaidó as interim president failed, and last year Mr. Guaidó fled to the United States.

Now, Ms. Machado, a conservative former member of the national assembly once rejected by her own colleagues, has not only corralled Venezuela’s fractious opposition behind her, but has also captivated a broad swath of the electorate with a promise for sweeping government change.

Even former critics say her movement is the country’s most important since the one built by Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s mentor and the founder of Venezuela’s 25-year-old socialist project.

A key difference is that “Chavismo coalesced around an ideological proposal for the country” — socialism — while “María Corina’s movement revolves around the people’s weariness with Madurismo,” said Andrés Izarra, who worked as Mr. Chávez’s communications minister before becoming a government critic and going into exile.

Under Mr. Maduro, the country has witnessed an extraordinary economic contraction — the largest outside of war in at least 50 years, economists say. While the economy has improved slightly in recent years, millions of people still cannot afford enough food or critical medications.

If Mr. Maduro stays in power, polls show that large numbers of Venezuelans plan to flee the country, a northward movement that could begin weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

“For the future of our children!” shouted one young woman as Ms. Machado’s car last week rolled through the city of Guanare, a six-hour drive west of Caracas, the capital.

That morning, Ms. Machado’s security adviser was the latest in a string of campaign members to be arrested by the government. To evade authorities, the opposition leader sped out of Caracas before dawn, her car windows still bearing the cracks from rock-throwing Maduro supporters.

By late afternoon, she had climbed onto her car’s roof in Guanare, wearing pearl earrings and a ponytail.

The cries of support reached a fever pitch. At her side, a man without shoes asked how he could help protect her.

In a barely audible speech delivered through a megaphone, Ms. Machado promised to revive the economy and bring children who had migrated back home.

Her popularity will be tested this Sunday, when the country holds a presidential election that could bring an end to 25 years of socialist rule.

Since taking office in 2013, Mr. Maduro has held elections to try to lend legitimacy to his government. He has often tilted the ballot box in his favor, banning popular competitors or outright inventing the results.

In January, a high court ruled that Ms. Machado was barred from the ballot. Then came a surprise: The government allowed her coalition to nominate a different candidate, and Mr. González became the consensus choice.

If the opposition wins, Mr. González, 74, will be president. But from Washington to Caracas, everyone understands that Ms. Machado is the driving force behind the movement.

In a joint interview, the pair declined to say what role Ms. Machado would have in a González administration. But Ms. Machado said that she believed they could win.

“Never in 25 years have we gone into an election in such a strong position,” she said.

As the vote nears, the nation is on tenterhooks. Polls show enormous support for the opposition. But Mr. Maduro has shown little interest in giving up power. Last week, he vowed at a campaign event that Venezuela would fall “into a blood bath, into a fratricidal civil war” if he didn’t win.

The eldest of four daughters in a prominent steel business family, Ms. Machado attended an elite Catholic girls’ school in Caracas and a boarding school in Wellesley, Mass. In a 2005 interview with The New York Times, she called her youth “a childhood protected from contact with reality.”

She trained as an engineer and then took a position in the family company, Sivensa, before working with her mother in a home for abandoned children.

She became a political activist in 2002, helping to found a voter rights group, Súmate, that eventually led a failed effort to recall Mr. Chávez. She was a darling of Washington — the U.S. government provided financial aid to Súmate — and became one of Mr. Chávez’s most detested adversaries.

But it wasn’t just the government that loathed her. Among colleagues in the opposition, she was often viewed as too conservative, too confrontational and too “sifrina” — Venezuelan for “snobbishly high class” — to become the movement’s leader.

She has said that the politician she most admires is Margaret Thatcher, the conservative icon known for her stubbornness and fealty to the free market. And Ms. Machado has long supported privatizing PDVSA, the state oil company, a move other opposition leaders say would put Venezuela’s most valuable resource in the hands of a few.

In 2012, when Ms. Machado was a legislator, she clashed with Mr. Chávez in a televised debate, accusing him of robbing everyday Venezuelans through expropriation.

Mr. Chávez mocked her. “Eagles don’t hunt flies,” he told her. He was the eagle. She was the fly.

For her bullish rhetoric, journalists and analysts began to call Ms. Machado her country’s “iron lady,” the nickname given to Ms. Thatcher.

Questions still surround Ms. Machado’s actions in 2002, when dissident military officers and opposition figures led a short-lived coup meant to oust Mr. Chávez. Ms. Machado was at the presidential palace during the installation of a new president, Pedro Carmona.

In the 2005 interview with The Times, Ms. Machado insisted that she and her mother were in the palace that day only to visit Mr. Carmona’s wife, a family friend — not to support the coup.

More recently, in a 2019 interview with the BBC, Ms. Machado called on “Western democracies” to understand that Mr. Maduro would only leave power “in the face of a credible, imminent and severe threat of the use of force.”

But today, Ms. Machado’s supporters say this battle-ready toughness is exactly what the country needs.

She has also moderated her tone, and now leads with an accompanying softness, cutting across political lines by promising to unite families separated by migration.

She is a mother of three adult children, all of whom live abroad.

Henrique Capriles, an opposition leader who has criticized Ms. Machado in the past, said that her political independence ultimately benefited her, allowing her to gain the trust of voters disenchanted by the rest of the opposition.

Still, he added that Mr. González, a quiet diplomat, might be better suited for the delicate task of dismantling the 25-year-old socialist system. Within power sectors like the armed forces, Ms. Machado is likely to be seen as an antagonistic figure looking to exact retribution on those associated with Mr. Maduro.

On the campaign trail, she has promised to “bury socialism forever” and create a nation where “the criminals and the corrupt go to prison.”

“Edmundo doesn’t generate fear,” Mr. Capriles said. “That’s not a weakness, it’s a strength.”

A decade ago, the government banned Ms. Machado from leaving the country, clearly viewing her lobbying in Washington as a threat. Now, it seems that keeping her at home may have been one Mr. Maduro’s biggest tactical errors.

Doris Lugo, 40, attended the event in Guanare, explaining that her husband and son had left the country in search of work.

“But soon they will return,” she said, confident that Mr. González and Ms. Machado would triumph.

“We have faith in God,” she added, “that the fly is going to trap the eagle.”

Anatoly Kurmanaev contributed reporting from Caracas, and Genevieve Glatsky from Bogotá. Kitty Bennett contributed research.