For more than a century, pilgrims from all over the world seeking romance and passion have made their way to the City of Light. The seductive lure of Paris has long been irresistible to lovers, artists, epicureans, and connoisseurs of the good life. Globe-trotting film critic and writer John Baxter heard her siren song and was bewitched. Now he offers readers a witty, audacious, scandalous behind-the-scenes excursion into the colorful all-night show that is Paris -- interweaving his own experience of falling in love, with a delightfully salacious tour of the sultry Parisian corners most guidebooks ignore: from the literary cafés of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and de Beauvoir to the brothels where Dietrich and Duke Ellington held court, where Salvador Dali sated his fantasies, and Edward VII kept a sumptuous champagne bath for his favorite girls. Australian-born Baxter moves from Los Angeles to Paris to start a new marriage to a French television newscaster. Searching for a place to live, they find an apartment on the tiny, Seine-bound Ile de la Cite, the veritable heart of Paris, steps from Notre Dame. From there, Baxter leads his readers on a decidedly eccentric tour of Paris. A film critic, Baxter intelligently connects Paris venues to various films, French and American, familiar and obscure. Baxter loves to focus on Paris' erotic history, and he does a particularly stunning job of explicating Josephine Baker's electric effect on the French psyche, attributing to her nude dances a profound restructuring of French attitudes to sexuality. Foodies will revel in Baxter's portrayals of Parisian restaurants' obsession with offal. Baxter's mordant humor is put to good use in his observations on Paris' ubiquitous dogs and their ton-a-day droppings on the capital's chic byways. Baxter also provides lively perspectives on Andre Malraux and on the city's ancient marketplace, Les Halles. Mark Knoblauch Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Humorous and moving . . . an explosive orgy of French cultural and erotic delights.” - Jeffrey Green, author of French Spirits “Towers above most recent memoirs of life abroad.” - Sunday Times (London) The author's personal view and guided tour of the people and places of Paris associated with the city's legend. It includes interviews with painters, film-makers, actresses, writers, poets, plus visits to the cafes of Montparnasse, where Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Man Ray hung out. For more than a century, pilgrims from all over the world seeking romance and passion have made their way to the City of Light. The seductive lure of Paris has long been irresistible to lovers, artists, epicureans, and connoisseurs of the good life. Globe-trotting film critic and writer John Baxter heard her siren song and was bewitched. Now he offers readers a witty, audacious, scandalous behind-the-scenes excursion into the colorful all-night show that is Paris -- interweaving his own experience of falling in love, with a delightfully salacious tour of the sultry Parisian corners most guidebooks ignore: from the literary cafés of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and de Beauvoir to the brothels where Dietrich and Duke Ellington held court, where Salvador Dali sated his fantasies, and Edward VII kept a sumptuous champagne bath for his favorite girls. John Baxter has lived in Paris for more than twenty years. He is the author of four acclaimed memoirs about his life in France: The Perfect Meal: In Search of the Lost Tastes of France ; The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris ; Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas ; and We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light . Baxter, who gives literary walking tours through Paris, is also a film critic and biographer whose subjects have included the directors Fellini, Kubrick, Woody Allen, and most recently, Josef von Sternberg. Born in Australia, he lives with his wife and daughter in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, in the same building Sylvia Beach called home. We'll Always Have Paris Sex and Love in the City of Light By John Baxter HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2006 John Baxter All right reserved. ISBN: 0060832886 Chapter One A Love Story No amount of fire and freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby For me, the 1920s and 1930s radiate a glamour they can only possess for someone who didn't live through them. Shorn of grim features such as the Great Depression, the 1919 influenza epidemic, the Russian revolution and the Holocaust, Europe between the two world wars appears to blaze. Or at least it did to someone growing up in an Australian country town in the 1960s. But like the Hawaiian tsunamis that petered out on Bondi Beach as modest swells, the upheavals that revolutionized art and culture on the other side of the world were ripples by the time they reached us. I could see the ghost of a new philosph