Into a Paris Quartier - Hardcover

Johnson, Diane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792272668 ISBN 13: 9780792272663

Publisher: National Geographic, 2005

Synopsis

As a child, Diane Johnson was entranced by The Three Musketeers, dashing 17th-century residents of the famous romantic quartier called St.-Germain-des-Prés. Now, the paperback edition of her delightful book will take even more Americans to the richly historic part of the city that has always attracted us, from Ben Franklin in the 18th-century to raffish novelist Henry Miller in the 20th. 

Modern St.-Germain is lively and prosperous, and fifty years ago its heady mix of jazz and existentialism defined urbane cool, but Johnson takes a longer view. "Beside the shades of Jean-Paul Sartre and Edith Piaf," she writes, "there is another crowd of resident ghosts... misty figures in plumed hats whose fortunes and passions were enacted among these beautiful, imposing buildings." From her kitchen window, she looks out on a chapel begun by Reine Margot, wife of Henri IV; nearby streets are haunted by the shades of two sinister cardinals, Mazarin and Richelieu, as well as four famed queens and at least five kings. Delacroix, Corot, Ingres, David, and Manet all lived in St.-Germain; Oscar Wilde died there; and everybody who was anybody visited sooner or later. 

With her delicious imagination and wry, opinionated voice, Diane Johnson makes a companionable and fascinating guide to a classic neighborhood as cosmopolitan as it is quintessentially French.

About this title

About the Author

Novelist, travel writer, biographer, and essayist DIANE JOHNSON was born in 1934 in Illinois. She earned a Ph.D. in English from UCLA in the late 1960s just as her first novel, Fair Game, was published. After several more novels, Johnson wrote the National Book Award-nominated Lesser Lives. In 1997, Diane Johnson published Le Divorce, which went on to become a National Bestseller and marked the author's third time as a National Book Award Finalist for fiction.  Le Divorce was released as a major motion picture in 2003. Her next novel, Le Mariage (2000) was on the bestseller lists in the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, and Newsday, and was a New York Times Book Review "Notable Book" for 2000. Her thirteenth novel, L'Affaire, was published to critical acclaim by Dutton in 2003. Diane Johnson now divides her time between Paris and San Francisco.

Reviews

The Paris Left Bank neighborhood of St.-Germain is most often connected to the era from the 1940s through the '60s, when Sartre, de Beauvoir and others gathered in its cafes to discuss existentialism and listen to jazz; and the district has also long been associated with American expatriates from Thomas Jefferson to Ernest Hemingway. Johnson, who's written about Americans in France in Le Divorce and other novels, continues that tradition, living there six months out of the year, in an apartment that looks out onto a 400-year-old chapel built by Queen Margot, first wife of Henry IV. She offers a fractured yet often fascinating walking tour of sorts, explaining, for example, that Place St.-Germain-des-Prés is "cobbled with largish stones, terrible to walk on in high heels"; and that 5, rue Bonaparte has been home to Napoleon's sister, Pauline Borghese, to painter Edouard Manet and to Pierre Bergé, founder of Yves Saint Laurent. She's enthralled with the story of The Three Musketeers, explaining how Dumas's immortal characters were once living people who may have conducted their sword fights on the very spot where she walks daily. This admittedly subjective guide to Paris is at once a quick lesson in history from the 16th through the late 20th centuries as well as an insightful look at the mind of a novelist and her inspiration. Map. (May)
Copyright Š Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Johnson hymns the delights of Paris' Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the capital's historic cradle of intellectual life, home to famous Parisians for centuries. Born in America's heartland, Johnson adores the streets, shops, and people who inhabit her adopted Saint-Germain. Her accounts of her daily walks brim with color, delight, affection, and an intuitive sense of multilayered history. She tells vividly of sixteenth-century religious wars that pitted Catholic against Protestant and of the area's relation to Queen Margot. Connecting all the places of her beloved neighborhood come the characters of The Three Musketeers, whose adventures feature this most lively part of Paris. A valuable guidebook and background for the tourist looking for deeper insight. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright Š American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: National Geographic
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0792272668
• ISBN 13: 9780792272663
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204