From the Foreword

Of all the books about Paris published each year, not one that I can remember tells you where to find the famous Art Nouveau public toilets in the place de la Madeleine, let alone telling you what to look for in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. David Downie has a delightful sensibility and the most delighted eye, the most perseverance, and the perfect French, bien sûr, and these allow him to uncover secrets. Uncover them he has, the secrets of this fascinating city, and not the ones you'll read anywhere else….

To take this book as a guidebook, walk out with it as he did and follow his path, is to have adventures, and to see a side of Paris anyone could see, but hardly anyone does.

Suppose you aren't in Paris? Or you're in Paris on a rainy day? Just to sit inside and read this book will transport you, for Downie is above all a wonderful, and wonderfully well-read writer. The essays are delightful as essays, but come fine weather I also recommend following his programs to the letter - a day of looking at the Paris of 1900, for instance. It's still here….

Or if 1900 is too recent, try the Paris of Beaumarchais, the playwright who invented Figaro, in the days of Louis XV and XVI…. You'll learn about the topography of the Buttes-Chaumont, the gorgeous park in the 19th arrondissement, far from the tourist track…

What of the man who has served up this delicious array of treats? Something of a gourmet, for one thing, and a fabled cook. I was familiar with his cookbook, Cooking the Roman Way, but now I see that the same qualities that make someone love cookery make him love the odd bit of information, the smorgasbord of observations, the taste of the something curious in the scenes before him. Beside a scholar and a gifted flâneur, you always want a food-lover to be your guide when possible, and Downie is all three.

And the photographs. Paris must be the most photographed place in the world, from Doisneau to Cartier-Bresson. These beautiful studies by Alison Harris extend that literature with a powerful formal talent. Her camera's loving dissection of details that the busy traveler might not notice for himself, makes of this book a splendid object in itself, a sort of bibliophilic gem.

Diane Johnson, Paris