I’ll admit I’ve been dreaming of Paris lately— of the warm glow of lamps lining the rue over the Seine, the crackle of fresh-baked croissants at the boulangerie. Of the things we are in perfect harmony on, my sister and I agree that we’d both adore la cité. While idly planning a sisters trip to the City of Light, I started reading and I started dreaming. These are just a few books that give Paris its ambience.
Madame Picasso, Anne Girard
La Belle Époque… That dreamy time before the first world war when artists, rogues and bon vivants flocked to the city of light under the guise of nouveau personas. Eva Gouel, a quiet country girl born to Polish immigrants, is one of them. She has refashioned herself as Marcelle and found work as a costumer at the Moulin Rouge where she catches the eye of a rising star whose work many people dismiss as garrish—Pablo Picasso.
But there’s just one problem. Picasso’s fealty is to the beautiful and tempestuous Fernande Olivier. His sultry red-haired muse, she believes he will never leave her. Tempers and passions flare as the artist finds himself torn between two very different women. One whose fiery spirit matches his own Spanish bravado, and the other whose obsequiousness compliments the intimacy he pours into his paintings. It’s only when Picasso is implicated in a shocking art crime that he realizes whom he truly desires.
The Paris Bookseller, Kerri Maher
The war is over, hemlines and hairstyles are shorter, and with prohibition and censorship smothering good times in America, writers are coming across the pond in droves seeking liberté. In 1919, Sylvia opens her English-language bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, on the left bank facing Île de la Cité and it quickly becomes a haven for writers like Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald. Her life is forever altered when she publishes James Joyce’s boundary-pushing new manuscript—Ulysses, which was put on trial for indecency and banned in the United States.
The dust jacket immediately gave me Midnight in Paris vibes. If you haven’t seen the Woody Allen movie in which a struggling writer visiting Paris slips outside to roam the streets at night, and when he does so, accidentally steps back in time and meets some of the greatest literary minds of the age, then we’ve got something else to talk about. But if you have, then you know exactly what I mean when I say that Maher stirs within me a nostalgia for a time I have never experienced. What I wouldn’t give to step through the looking glass into Gertrude Stein’s literary salon!
Jacqueline in Paris, Ann Mah
Finally we arrive at the post-war period and it is decidedly more sombre. Parisians never lost their sense of high-handedness and I can practically hear the clip of kitten heels on the cobblestone sidewalks under the sashaying skirts of Christian Dior’s new look as a flock of giggling American college girls descend on the city. But Paris is shell-shocked and rationed. Jackie stays with the widowed Comtesse de Renty, who served as a resistance worker during the occupation and spent the last few months of the war imprisoned in Ravensbrück. Her world is far from the priveleged one Jackie came from.
I knew something of Jackie’s gap year from Stephanie Thornton’s And They Called it Camelot, and this missing year of her life always intrigued me. Before she met JFK and became one of the most influential women in America, Jackie was a bookish girl with a talent for language acquisition, and in 1949 she spent a year in Paris. A time she later referred to as the best year of her life. 70 years later, Mah returned to Paris to retrace Jackie’s steps. Jacqueline in Paris is a lovely account of those formative years where Jackie was well and truly herself.