Description

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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.

About the Author

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John Baxter is a writer, journalist, and filmmaker; he has called Paris home since 1989. He is the author of numerous books including the autobiographical Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris, Chronicles of Old Paris: Exploring the Historic City of Light, The Golden Moments of Paris: A Guide to the Paris of the 1920s, and French Riviera and Its Artists.

Praise For…

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"In his latest homage to Paris, Baxter, who has lived there since 1989, celebrates the city’s indelible association with love, sometimes blissfully romantic, sometimes madly obsessive. Paris, he writes, 'has advertised itself as a venue for the exploration of passion in all its forms and its capacity for exaltation and despair'...Lively vignettes about.'" storied lovers.—Kirkus Reviews

"Freewheeling and often titillating, this frothy history is packed with intimate details certain to captivate the armchair traveler." —Publishers Weekly