Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
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4.3 • 14 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestseller: the secrets of the City of Light, revealed in the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten—by the author of the acclaimed The Discovery of France.
This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction, of the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten.
A young artillery lieutenant, strolling through the Palais-Royal, observes disapprovingly the courtesans plying their trade. A particular woman catches his eye; nature takes its course. Later that night Napoleon Bonaparte writes a meticulous account of his first sexual encounter. A well-dressed woman, fleeing the Louvre, takes a wrong turn and loses her way in the nameless streets of the Left Bank. For want of a map—there were no reliable ones at the time—Marie-Antoinette will go to the guillotine.
Baudelaire, the photographer Marville, Baron Haussmann, the real-life Mimi of La Boheme, Proust, Adolf Hitler touring the occupied capital in the company of his generals, Charles de Gaulle (who is suspected of having faked an assassination attempt in Notre Dame)—these and many more are Robb’s cast of characters, and the settings range from the quarries and catacombs beneath the streets to the grand monuments to the appalling suburbs ringing the city today. The result is a resonant, intimate history with the power of a great novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the same exhilarating sense of historical adventure and narrative elegance he brought to The Discovery of France, Robb's new book might be called The Discovery of Paris. Through a series of chronological episodes, Robb relates little-known events in the city's history, each featuring a fascinating figure, some well-known (Napoleon or the great criminal-turned-sleuth Vidocq), some less so (Henry Murger, the struggling writer whose Latin Quarter vignettes became La Vie de Boh me). Each figure discovers or reveals an unknown Paris. In the 1770s Charles-Axel Guillaumot explored the ancient quarries beneath the city and built the catacombs there; a little-noticed carved panel at Notre-Dame is at the heart of a 1937 episode involving espionage, alchemy, and a future nuclear inferno. The most thrilling chapter tells the supposedly true tale (the original records are lost) behind The Count of Monte Cristo; only the tale of actress and singer Juliette Greco framed as a shooting script fails to entice. With his profound knowledge of Paris, its treasures and squalor, its heroes and victims, Robb reveals a city of not only lights but darkness, which, though discovered, remains unknowable and alluring.
Customer Reviews
Parisians
Eh, mediocre. The stories are kind of rambling and hard to follow. They don't really tell the story of Paris either. Some of the stories are more interesting than others but I wouldn't pay $15 for the book again.