Of Love and Paris
Historic, Romantic and Obsessive Liaisons
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
The French may not have invented love but they perfected it, and the laboratory in which they did so was Paris. James Joyce called the city "a lamp for lovers, hung in the wood of the world."
From the Middle Ages, Paris has drawn those who wish to experience the limits of love – intellectual, spiritual, carnal. In Of Love and Paris, John Baxter turns the spotlight on some of them, from the medieval troubadours who seduced court ladies with flowery verse to Man Ray, whose camera conferred immortality on his lover and model Kiki, and Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, who turned their moans of sexual pleasure into music. The grandes horizontales of the belle epoque, accomplished technicians of eroticism who drew the rich and powerful of both sexes to Paris, had their modern incarnation in Gala, who left the bed she shared with poet Paul Éluard and painter Max Ernst to seduce the young Salvador DalÍ.
Love in Paris, however, can take unexpected forms. Was the devotion to Marcel Proust of his housekeeper CÉleste Albaret any less passionate than that of Anne Desclos to Jean Paulhan, for whom she composed "the strangest love letter any man ever received"—the notorious novel Story of O, the predecessor of Fifty Shades of Grey? Love has a multitude of faces, and some of the most mysterious and surprising are unveiled in Of Love and Paris.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirist and Francophile Baxter (A Year in Paris) offers an alluring collection of essays focused on the Parisian "culture of acceptance and acquiescence" in the boudoir. He combines personal reflections with a literary-historical account of neighborhoods and locales, including Montparnasse circa 1924, when Jean Rhys moved in with Ford Madox Ford and his girlfriend, and Café Flore during WWII, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court while indulging in "contingent liaisons." Baxter also spotlights Napoleon, whose consort Josephine attempted to "domesticate him by sharing sexual experience," and Princess Diana, who was "ripe to be seduced" by Dodi Fayed at the Ritz in 1997. There are also succinct assessments of the love lives of Arthur Rimbaud, who seduced married poet Paul Verlaine, and diarist Anaïs Nin, who trysted with Henry Miller in 1932 at the Hotel Central, as well as a profile of Anne Desclos, author of The Story of O, about a woman who "agrees to submit to abuses similar to those inflicted on Sade's heroines." Baxter concludes with his own 1989 journey from his native Australia to Paris, where he eventually made a home with his wife and daughter in the building where bookseller Sylvia Beach once lived. Freewheeling and often titillating, this frothy history is packed with intimate details certain to captivate the armchair traveler.
