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Table of Contents
About the Author
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Copyright Page
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To François
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to particularly thank Bill Swainson for his unwavering support and
heartwarming erudition; Simon Trewin, a wonderful born trouper; Dorian
Karchmar for her laser-sharp eye and attention to details; Gillian Blake, favorite
publisher grande dame; Caroline Zancan, editor supremo alongside Kerry
Cullen; and Michael Fishwick at Bloomsbury for his shrewd comments.
I would also like to thank my first reader, Linden Lawson, whose enthusiasm
proved a great support, and Anna Hervé, a most astute poisson pilote and
adviser.
In the course of researching this book, I think I fell in love with both writer
Irwin Shaw and the Louvre’s savior Jacques Jaujard, I sympathized with Janet
Flanner’s quest for a third sex, smiled at Saul Bellow’s superiority complex, and
was awed by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s brazen intelligence. I
didn’t drink the way they used to on the Left Bank in postwar Paris, nor did I
take any drugs, but sometimes I wish I had.
And to Nicole Parrot, the great inspiration behind this book, I’d like to say:
“We will always have Paris.”
Paris was not weary of us. We were still handsome and admired; they
smiled and turned on the street. The rooms were chill but they had
proportion and there was more than a hint of another life, free of
familiar inhibitions, a sacred life, this great museum and pleasure
garden evolved for you alone.
—JAMES SALTER, Burning the Days
CHRONOLOGY
1939
August 23 Soviet foreign minister Molotov and his German counterpart von Ribbentrop sign a pact
of nonaggression giving Hitler free rein to attack the West.
August 24 Jacques Jaujard closes the Louvre: four thousand treasures are being packed for safety
secretly.
September 1 Germany invades Poland.
September 3 France and Great Britain declare war on Germany.
1940
May Hiding in Paris at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop, Arthur Koestler
sends his manuscript Darkness at Noon to a London publisher.
May 10 Germany invades Belgium and northern France.
June 10 Mussolini’s Italy declares war on France and Britain.
June 11 The French government flees Paris.
June 14 The German army enters Paris.
June 18 In an address broadcast by the BBC, French general Charles de Gaulle calls from London
for France to continue the fight, urging all young men and women to join him in
résistance.
June 22 Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Cartier-Bresson are held prisoner and taken to war prisoners’
camps in Germany.
June 23 Adolf Hitler poses for photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower.
1941
March Jean-Paul Sartre is back in Paris after escaping his prisoners’ camp.
April– Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty start Resistance group Socialisme et Liberté
September but soon give up as many members prefer the more effective communist resistance groups.
Sartre goes back to teaching philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet.
December Germany declares war on the United States.
1942
1942
January Sonderführer Gerhard Heller, the Francophile and yet German censor of French literature,
reads Albert Camus’ The Outsider and authorizes its publication.
September The CNE, Comité National des Écrivains, the résistant writers’ group, has its weekly
meetings at the flat of writer Édith Thomas.
November The United States invades North Africa.
1943
June Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Les mouches opens at the Théâtre de la Cité.
August The same week, Jean-Paul Sartre’s seven-hundred-page philosophy treatise L’être et le
néant (Being and Nothingness) and Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, L’invitée (She Came
to Stay), the semiautobiographical story of a ménage-à-trois, are released.
September Picasso asks Hungarian photographer Brassaï, who lives in hiding in Paris, to take pictures
of the works he has done under the occupation.
1944
June On June 6, D-Day starts at dawn. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Georges Braque listen to the
news together on the wireless.
August The insurrection in Paris starts on August 16. Nazi commander von Choltitz signs his
surrender on August 25 at 4:15 p.m.
September L’épuration (the purge) of collaborators starts.
1945
January Albert Camus, editor of Combat, sends Jean-Paul Sartre as a reporter to the United States
for his first American trip and Beauvoir to report on life in Spain and Portugal.
July Alexander Calder works on a mobile exhibition with the help of Marcel Duchamp and
Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he has just befriended.
August Marshal Pétain’s trial for treason. Atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
October Sartre gives his lecture “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” at Club Maintenant. Women
faint.
Elections in France. The French decide to bury the Third Republic.
1946
January Charles de Gaulle resigns.
Description:An incandescent group portrait of the midcentury artists and thinkers whose lives, loves, collaborations, and passions were forged against the wartime destruction and postwar rebirth of ParisIn this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triu
