Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [22]
Paris in Mind, Jennifer Lee (2003) – an anthology of essays and excerpts by 29 American writers – from Edith Wharton and James Baldwin to David Sedaris and Dave Barry (who discusses how to pronounce the French ‘r’).
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow (2003) – a Paris-based Canadian journalist couple explains the essence of what it means to be French and how they got to be the way they are.
The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen (1949) – Paris through the eyes and ears of an 11-year-old English girl sequestered for 24 hours in a Parisian townhouse. Dark, evocative, classic.
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The literature of the 18th century is dominated by philosophers (Click here), among them Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire’s political writings, arguing that society is fundamentally opposed to nature, had a profound and lasting influence on the century, and he is buried in the Panthéon. Rousseau’s sensitivity to landscape and its moods anticipate romanticism, and the insistence on his own singularity in Les Confessions made it the first modern autobiography. He, too, is buried in the Panthéon.
The 19th century brought Victor Hugo, as much acclaimed for his poetry as for his novels, who lived on the place des Vosges before fleeing to the Channel Islands during the Second Empire. Les Misérables (1862) describes life among the poor and marginalised of Paris during the first half of the 19th century; the 20-page flight of the central character, Jean Valjean, through the sewers of the capital is memorable. Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame; 1831), a medieval romance and tragedy revolving around the life of the celebrated cathedral, made Hugo the key figure of French romanticism.
Other influential 19th-century novelists include Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), Honoré de Balzac, Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin (better known as George Sand) and, of course, Alexandre Dumas, who wrote the swashbuckling adventures Le Compte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) and Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers). The latter tells the story of d’Artagnan (based on the historical personage Charles de Baatz d’Artagnan, 1623–73), who arrives in Paris as a young Gascon determined to become one of the guardsmen of Louis XIII.
In 1857 two landmarks of French literature were published in book form: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. Both writers were tried for the supposed immorality of their works. Flaubert won his case, and his novel was distributed without censorship. Baudelaire, who moonlighted as a translator in Paris (he introduced the works of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe to Europe in editions that have since become classics of English-to-French translation), was obliged to cut a half-dozen poems from his work and was fined 300 francs, and he died an early and painful death, practically unknown. Flaubert’s second-most popular novel, L’Éducation Sentimentale (Sentimental Education), presents a vivid picture of life among Parisian dilettantes, intellectuals and revolutionaries during the decline and fall of Louis-Philippe’s monarchy and the February Revolution of 1848.
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CARA BLACK
Cara Black (www.carablack.com), who divides her time between Paris and San Francisco, is the author of a best-selling murder-by-arrondissement series set in Paris and featuring the intrepid, half-French-half-American sleuth Aimée Leduc. The latest is Murder in the Rue de Paradis.
A Francophile from California... How does that work? Francophilia goes way back. I had French nuns in school, my uncle studied under Georges Braque on the GI Bill after the war and in 1971, while travelling through Paris, I went to Rue du Bac and knocked on the door of my favourite writer, [two-times Prix Goncourt winner] Romain Gary. He invited me to his café for an espresso and a cigar. We both had both.
Ah, smoke – but fire? All