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his wife bought an apartment in it some years before this book was published. Though his (French) wife would prefer to live in an apartment overlooking the Place des Vosges “to any other place on earth,” the pied-à-terre they buy is on the notable Marais street of the rue des Rosiers, then, as now, too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. But they love it, and they love this neighborhood. Karmel ends this well-written and fascinating book with a chapter entitled “Neighbors,” which is a walking tour that begins on the rue Vieille-du-Temple and ends in the Place des Vosges. Lastly, he includes a wonderful excerpt from Le Piéton de Paris (The Walker of Paris) by poet and writer Léon-Paul Fargue (1876–1947), who was an avid wanderer best known for his evocative depictions of Paris. In this three-page excerpt alone, one learns quite a bit about the Marais, which is “not merely the past,” as Karmel notes, but “also a vibrant, living neighborhood in the present.”

Into a Paris Quartier: Reine Margot’s Chapel and Other Haunts of St.-Germain, Diane Johnson (National Geographic Directions, 2005). Paris has haunted the American imagination from the days of Franklin and Jefferson, Johnson notes in her introduction to this interesting and quirky book, and the city has also occupied an important place in American literature, from Henry James to Hemingway. “And, like Jefferson’s, like Gertrude Stein’s, the American imagination has tended to fasten on a particular part of Paris: the Left Bank around the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.” As Johnson also notes, the Saint-Germain neighborhood may just be the most visited and written about of all Parisian neighborhoods, so it was an unlikely candidate for her to write a book about. But something Johnson sees every day outside her kitchen window stood out to her, symbolizing her present connection to Saint-Germain: “the back of a little chapel built by Queen Marguerite de Valois in 1608.” (Valois was the first wife of Henri IV.) Johnson not only reveals the story of this chapel but essentially the stories of a Paris most visitors walk right past and never notice. Though I eagerly devoured these stories of a favorite quartier, it was a remark in Johnson’s introduction that really made me want to read this book. As she was writing an introduction to a collection of short stories about Paris by American writers, she was struck by how many of the stories were about personal defeat—the Americans in almost all the stories go home “to face real life in the States, and will think wistfully forever after about what might have been, if only they had stayed, or had learned how to stay, in Paris. We are moved to ask: What is it about Paris? And what is eluding us at home?”

Man Ray’s Montparnasse, Herbert Lottman (Harry N. Abrams, 2001). Lottman first went to Paris in 1949 as a Fulbright fellow and has spent most of his life since then in France. He’s also the author of a number of French-themed books, including biographies of Philippe Pétain, Gustave Flaubert, Colette, and Jules Verne, and The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Houghton Mifflin, 1982). But it was Montparnasse that Lottman had wanted to write about for a long time—“ever since I settled in Paris in the late 1950s and began my explorations into its cultural life.” He couldn’t quite figure out how to connect the dots between the Dada artists, the Surrealists, the École de Paris painters, the Anglo-Americans, heirs and heiresses, Gertrude Stein’s weekly open house—until he realized that American photographer Man Ray was the link. “Man Ray could talk to everybody, and he made it a point to do so. And not surprisingly, everybody was ready to talk to this friendly New Yorker, not necessarily for his conversation but for his camera, which he was eager to use.” Lottman vividly evokes the first thirty years of Paris in the twentieth century, when the streets surrounding boulevard du Montparnasse and the boulevard Raspail were the center of the avant-garde in Europe. By 1934, however, France