Paris Stories /anglais - Hardcover

Unknown Author

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841596205 ISBN 13: 9781841596204

Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE UK, 2016

Synopsis

In the eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne explores the temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eye-witness account of the Revolution. From the 1800s, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola offer fascinating portraits of the city's teeming humanity; the Goncourt brothers chronicle the explosion of artistic talent; Huysmans describes an evening at the Folies Bergère. Colette chronicles the pitfalls for a young girl in the decadent city of the early twentieth century; F. Scott Fitzgerald revels in the city's glamour; Jean Rhys's lost heroines wander from café to café; James Baldwin celebrates its sexual freedoms; and Raymond Queneau gleefully reinvents the language of the street. In our time, Michel Tournier's North African immigrant walks a camel along the boulevards, while Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano brilliantly maps the city's many arrondissements. The alluring power of Paris has never dimmed and it is richly captured in all its facets in these compelling and seductive tales.

About this title

About the Author

SHAUN WHITESIDE is a translator of French, German, Italian, and Dutch works. He lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PREFACE
 
‘We’ll always have Paris,’ Bogart tells Bergman at the end of Casablanca, establishing Paris once and for all as the romantic capital of the world, a position that the city continues to hold even today. This may account for its status as the world’s leading tourist destination, with its iconic landmarks, its boulevards and pavement cafés, its impeccable chic and, for Anglo-Saxon visitors at least, its dashing suggestions of freedom and, for some, impropriety. As I hope I show in this selection, there is of course much more to Paris than the tourists see. I have opened in the Paris of the early Renaissance, where Rabelais’ giant Gargantua, perched on the towers of Notre Dame, cheerfully relieves his bladder on the horrified crowd below, to stress another side of the city – its robust, outrageous satirical streak, its disdain for convention and decorum.
 
Eighteenth-century travellers like Laurence Sterne enjoyed teasing their readers with accounts of lax morals and brazen forwardness unimaginable at home – no doubt stirring many curious souls to make the journey themselves, or dream forlornly of doing so. Vivid accounts of the Revolution stress the potential for violence that lay beneath the city’s surface. And its great anatomists, the realist novelists of the nineteenth century, captured in almost photographic detail the archetypal city not only of the elegant upper classes who set the tone for the rest of Europe, but of the multitudes who toiled in the streets down below. The vibrant city of the twentieth century is a place of both gleeful artistic experiment and existential gloom, attracting both the gilded and the lost.
 
I hope that in this collection I have captured some of Paris’s great variety, its seamier side, the world of the petites gens, as well as its glitter, its glamour, its keen intelligence and its sexy, seductive allure. There is romance here, yes, but there is also cynicism, satire and revolt, and a refusal to be dragged down for long by history’s darker turns. ‘He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.’ So wrote Victor Hugo. I will raise a glass of champagne to that.
 
Shaun Whiteside

About this edition

• Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE UK
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1841596205
• ISBN 13: 9781841596204
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400