Of Love and Paris

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.”

Paris has always drawn those who wish to experience the limits of love — intellectual, spiritual, and carnal. In Of Love and Paris, John Baxter turns the spotlight on some infamous lovers, from the medieval troubadors who seduced court ladies with flowery verse, to Man Ray, whose camera conferred immortality on his lover and model Kiki de Montparnasse, and Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, who turned their moans of sexual pleasure into a hit song.

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, 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.