The Golden Moments of Paris A Guide to the Paris of the 1920s by John Baxter

The Golden Moments of Paris A Guide to the Paris of the 1920s

is a book written by John Baxter and published by Museyon Books. I admit I became addicted with John Baxter. His tales are fascinating, he is captivating; he knows how to capture the attention of the reader.

Every city has a moment more fertile, and the one of Paris, as a capital chosen by a lot of foreigners for its freedom and possibility of working, was the decade of the 1920s.

We know most facts: the creation of Shakespeare and Company wanted by Sylvia Beach; the story with Monnier, the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce; as wrote Sylvia in her biography appeared on 1956:  “My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company;” 

Baxter adds "Ironically, all threee in one way or another, betrayed her."

Montparnasse became in the 1920s as writes the author "In a city notorious for its insularity and suspicion of foreigners a place where artist could meet writer, dancer befriend painter, model encounter poet, surrealist consort with Impressionist, Russian

seduce Greek." Important restaurants where to meet people le Dome, le Select, le Rotonde.

Russian considered french the most elegant tongue for a polite conversation and the arrival of russian people of culture in the capital after all was not so surprising. In particular esponents of the Russian Ballet. 

Diaghilev a big impresario was one of the most prominent Russians in Paris. His eccentric life, his problems with diabetes, his constant research for some definitive cures created a myth. Coco Chanel paid his funeral. He is buried on Venice's island of San Michele, like also Stravinsky. 

Paul Guerlain was a romantic and in the 1920s created The Blue Hour, L'Heur Bleue. Coco Chanel didn't lose time creating Chanel n 5.

Gertrude Stein received a lot of visits because of the numerous paintings of Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne she owned. 

Everything sounded pacific in the 1920s? Not exactly. A tall and slim man with a long beard loved to kill women. Widows. Serially. I am not joking.

Landru loved to kill widows plenty of money. Same scheme all the times, once discovered and arrested, after a trial, was killed. 

The famous stove where he would have put parts of dismembered bodies (never found)of the poor killed women for been burnt has been sold during an auction at someone in the USA. Brrr...

The story of Voronoff, whispered all the time of a horrible, scaring word, but I didn't want to write these thoughts, thinking that, well, they could be fantasies of my fertile imagination. Considering that Baxter added it, the word is AIDS.

But let's start from the beginning.

Voronoff was a Russian in Paris promising to people, most of them celebrities, a longest life, plenty of virility and less problems in general. He tried everything, including, and this one the experiment scared me to death and let me think at AIDS a transplant of a human ovary into a female monkey named Nora, inseminating it with human sperm (and not only this episode and experiment telling to you the entire truth.) Charlie Chaplin, Yeats and many more his clients.

Baxter, regarding AIDS writes: " It was even suggested that, in transplanting ape organs into man, he may have unwittingly transferred the AIDs virus, though no

evidence exists to support this contention." It is still unclear the birth of AIDS, sure these experiments didn't help, to my point of view.

Paris in the 1920s was a Paradise also for whoever wanted to experience a so-called artificial Paradise: absinthe, opium or the culture of forgetting through drugs. Yes, leaving alcohol alone, for once. Baudelaire wrote that "True reality is only in dreams."

If people needed a prescription for buying an aspirin, "drugs as cocaine, heroin, opium

and cannabis, all “natural” plant compounds, could be bought at any pharmacy as pills, gels, syrups, even teas" writes Baxter. I imagine the joy of consumers.

"But while not as powerful as its refined variants, morphine, heroin and codeine, opium was addictive."

Jean Cocteau smoked 60 pipes a day, trying to detox his body, without success. 

We will discover what happened at the Eiffel Tower, but a chapter I loved a lot was the one of the so-called Inconnue. An apparently sleeping girl mask (created after her death, it seems) attracted the attention of many. Dead, maybe this girl committed a suicide, so that's why she is so peaceful; that's why she smiles so much, she wanted it so badly, she did it and she rests in peace now. She apparently killed herself in the Seine in an historical moment when dying in this way was considered romantic. Point of views. 

Someone else thought that this mask can't be the mask of a dead person because muscles reveals life. 

Mystery continues. 

Paris inspired musicals. George Gershwin wrote An American in Paris  starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant and French music hall star George Guetary. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in 1932 wrote the screen musical Love Me Tonight.

Cafés in the 1920s changed. First of all owners created "the noisette, a classic

express with a dash of milk that gave it the color of a noisette or hazelnut. Americans preferred café allonge, “stretched” with extra hot water into something like brewed coffee. Cafés also introduced tea, wine, spirits, even, grudgingly, coffee with milk" writes Baxter. 

Paris was also chosen by gays and lesbians for the freedom breathed in the city. 

Wilde called homosexuality: "The love that dare not speak its name." Men in Britain with this tendency said to friends and relative that they had "an unusual temperament." No one spoke openly of homosexuality. In Paris the story was different. There was freedom and it wasn't illegal to have a companion of the same sex. 

Homosexual couples we remember Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas,

Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Romaine Brooks and the Australian Agnes Goodsir, Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly.

An homosexual, I guess bisexual back to the "normality" Robert McAlmon. He married Annie Winifred Ellerman called Bryher, an ex lesbian. Don't be too confused. People sometimes, before to find their own dimension try a lot :-)

A story that touched me a lot was the one of Harry Sturgis Crosby and Polly "Caresse" Peabody. Both wealthy but desperate people, they killed each other in a homicide-suicide. "Death is our marriage" they said. 

A lot of other stories of the Paris of the 1920s with then, as always, the best walks you can desire.

I thank Museyon Books for the copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori