Of love and Paris Historic, romantic and obsessive liaisons

Memoirist and Francophile Baxter (A Year in Paris) offers an alluring collection of essays focused on the Parisian "culture of acceptance and acquiescence" in the boudoir. He combines personal reflections with a literary-historical account of neighborhoods and locales, including Montparnasse circa 1924, when Jean Rhys moved in with Ford Madox Ford and his girlfriend, and Café Flore during WWII, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court while indulging in "contingent liaisons." Baxter also spotlights Napoleon, whose consort Josephine attempted to "domesticate him by sharing sexual experience," and Princess Diana, who was "ripe to be seduced" by Dodi Fayed at the Ritz in 1997. There are also succinct assessments of the love lives of Arthur Rimbaud, who seduced married poet Paul Verlaine, and diarist Anaïs Nin, who trysted with Henry Miller in 1932 at the Hotel Central, as well as a profile of Anne Desclos, author of The Story of O, about a woman who "agrees to submit to abuses similar to those inflicted on Sade's heroines." Baxter concludes with his own 1989 journey from his native Australia to Paris, where he eventually made a home with his wife and daughter in the building where bookseller Sylvia Beach once lived. Freewheeling and often titillating, this frothy history is packed with intimate details certain to captivate the armchair traveler. (Sept.)

Love in a seductive city. In his latest homage to Paris, Baxter, who has lived there since 1989, celebrates the city's indelible association with love, sometimes blissfully romantic, sometimes madly obsessive. Paris, he writes, "has advertised itself as a venue for the exploration of passion in all its forms and its capacity for exaltation and despair." In a series of brief essays, he chronicles liaisons from Napoleon and Josephine's to his own marriage to Marie-Dominique Montel. Despair certainly characterized several passions: Victor Hugo's schizophrenic daughter, Adèle, for example, descended into madness, obsessed over a lover who jilted her; Modigliani's lover Jeanne Hébuterne committed suicide after the artist died of tuberculosis; and the fate of Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Al-Fayed is well known. Same-sex couples include poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine; Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet; and Left Bank booksellers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Baxter asserts that Monnier's seduction of Beach was "more intellectual than sexual." The two did not share a bed or socialize with the Parisian lesbian community. Monnier eventually took a lover, photographer Gisèle Freund; Beach died impoverished and alone. Some couplings--Sartre and de Beauvoir, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin--were volatile. Baxter describes the Sartre--de Beauvoir affair as a "slow-motion train wreck." Others ended badly: Man Ray abandoned his lover and muse Kiki de Montparnasse, who descended into poverty and drugs. Baxter recounts tempestuous relationships (André Malraux and Louise de Vilmorin, for one), betrayals, and devotion, such as the marriage of Charles Boyer and actor Patricia Paterson. Baxter's marriage to Montel was incited by a hypnotism session in Los Angeles, in which he had a sudden recollection of their affair, seven years earlier, when he was living in Paris. He phoned her the next morning; six weeks later, she flew to LA; and two weeks after that, they both returned to Paris, where they have lived, happily, it seems, ever after. Lively vignettes about storied lovers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.