Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [23]
Does your research get down and dirty? I crawl under buildings, explore restrooms in old cafés, visit ghost metro stations, go down into the city sewers and even the tunnels under the Palais Royal. I interview police – I’m one of only two American women writers to have spent time in the Préfecture – and private detectives. Some of them have become friends and I take them to dinner.
Now we’re cooking! What’s on the menu? Murder most fowl? Steak saignant (‘bleeding’, or rare)? Anything but the écrévisse [freshwater crayfish] that come from the Seine. They feed on corpses. I discovered that while researching Murder on the Île Saint-Louis. One restaurant was still selling them.
Why are you always Right and not Left? How about murder in the sexy 6e or the louche Latin Quarter? I don’t write about the Paris of tourists, where people wear berets and carry baguettes. I’m not really comfortable on the Left Bank. I feel better where my friends live – the Marais, Belleville, Montmartre. I understand these places better.
I wish I could... Tie a scarf the way French women do.
I wish I hadn’t... Buried Baudelaire in Père Lachaise cemetery. He’s actually in Montparnasse.
I’ll always come back to Paris for... Hot chocolate at Ladurée, bicycle rides along the Canal St-Martin, the old stones of the Place des Vosges and the ghosts. Paris is full of ghosts and they communicate. You only need listen.
Interviewed by Steve Fallon
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STRANGERS IN PARIS
Foreigners (étrangers, or strangers, to the French) have found inspiration in Paris since Charles Dickens used the city alongside London as the backdrop to his novel on the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, in 1859. The glory days of Paris as a literary setting, however, were without a doubt the interwar years Click here.
Both Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast portray bohemian life in Paris between the wars; many of the vignettes in the latter – dissing Ford Maddox Ford in a café, ‘sizing up’ F Scott Fitzgerald in a toilet in the Latin Quarter and overhearing Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B Toklas, bitchin’ at one another from the sitting room of their salon near the Jardin du Luxembourg – are classic and très parisien.
Language guru Stein, who could be so tiresome with her wordplays and endless repetitions (‘A rose is a rose is a rose’, ‘Pigeons on the grass, alas’) in books like The Making of Americans, was able to let her hair down by assuming her lover’s identity in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. It’s a fascinating account of the author’s many years in Paris, her salon on the rue de Fleurus in the 6e and her friendships with Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Hemingway and others. It’s also where you’ll find that classic recipe for hashish brownies. Stein’s Wars I Have Seen is a personal account of life in German-occupied Paris.
Down and Out in Paris and London is George Orwell’s account of the time he spent working as a plongeur (dishwasher) in Paris and living with tramps in Paris and London in the early 1930s. Both Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy by Henry Miller are steamy novels set partly in the French capital. Mention should also be made of Anaïs Nin’s voluminous diaries and fiction, especially her published correspondence with Miller, which is highly evocative of 1930s Paris.
For a taste of Paris in the 1950s try Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s poignant account of a young American in Paris who falls in love with an Italian bartender, and his struggle with his sexuality.