Love Is in the Air of 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." From medieval times, Paris has drawn those who wish to experience the limits of love--intellectual, spiritual, carnal. In Love Is in the Air of Paris John Baxter turns the spotlight on some of them, from the medieval troubadors who seduced court ladies with flowery verse to Man Ray, whose camera conferred immortality on his lover and model Kiki, and Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, who turned their moans of sexual pleasure into music. The grandes horizontales of the belle epoque, accomplished technicians of eroticism who drew the rich and powerful of both sexes to Paris, had their modern incarnation in Gala, who left the bed she shared with poet Paul Éluard and painter Max Ernst to seduce the young Salvador Dalí. 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 Sto