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
Copyright © 2016 by Everyman's Library. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
