Overview

In his busy life Balzac wrote many love letters, and in The Human Comedy he portrayed many female beauties, but he certainly never imagined or met a creature as ‘sparkling and proud’ as his beloved city. The ever-new Paris to which he addresses his declaration of love consists of an accumulation of details – names, landmarks, streams, gates – a city with countless meticulously drawn figures: legal clerks, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators. Balzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. ‘To saunter is a science,’ he writes, ‘it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.’ This book follows in Balzac’s footsteps, crossing the city in his big boots, running between his printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistresses and friends, stopping for a moment, struck by a detail that his photographic memory faithfully fixed. ‘There are memories for me at every doorway, thoughts at each lamppost. There is no façade constructed, no building pulled down, whose birth or death I have not spied on. I partake in the immense movement of this world as if its soul was mine.’

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9781839767258

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Reviews

Praise for The Invention of Paris -- : This is a wondrous book, either to be read at home with a decent map, or carried about sur place through areas no tourists bother with. -- Adam Thorpe * Guardian * Hazan is all business. He trudges through Paris street by street, quoting what Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire or Kafka said about a particular spot, pointing out where barricades were once erected and thieves gathered for drinks. -- Donald Morrison * Financial Times * Amid the intellectual murkiness of the European scene, a few bright flames are burning: as witness the work of Eric Hazan. * New Left Review * Few will be able to resist. Hazan's brick-by-brick account of the city's history of strife and political posturing is riveting. * Publishers Weekly * Hazan wants to rescue individual moments from general forgetting and key sites from the bland homogenization of international city development; he is also a passionate left-wing historian seeking to rescue the truth of Paris's revolutionary past. -- Julian Barnes * London Review of Books * One of the greatest books about the city anyone has written in decades, towering over a crowded field, passionate and lyrical and sweeping and immediate. * New York Review of Books * This book is both a political and aesthetic delight, uncovering the real mysteries of Paris. -- Andrew Hussey, author of <i>Paris: The Secret History</i> With its astonishing breadth of reference and incredible detail, this is a must for all lovers of Paris. -- Kevin Rushby, author of <i>Paradise: A History of the Idea that Rules the World</i>

Author Information

Eric Hazan is the founder of the publisher La Fabrique and the author of several books, including the highly acclaimed The Invention of Paris. He has lived in Paris, France, all his life.

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