An Englishman in Paris: Notes and Recollections

An Englishman in Paris is a wry, affectionate portrait of the Quartier-Latin in the 1830s, written from the distance of half a century. Albert D. Vandam arrived in Paris as a young Englishman and found himself drawn into a world of artists, students, and dreamers who populated the narrow streets around the Latin Quarter. His memoir centers on La Childebert, the legendary café-tavern that served as headquarters for a loose confederation of young creators chasing glory in paint, prose, and poetry. Through Vandam's eyes, we meet the inhabitants of this bohemian enclave: the brilliant, the mad, the merely ambitious, and the truly great. He recounts the practical jokes that became legendary, the artistic rivalries that burned hot, and the peculiar camaraderie of young people united by poverty and purpose. The book captures something essential about a specific moment in cultural history, when a generation of artists believed they would change the world, and some of them actually did. Vandam writes with the tenderness of nostalgia for a world that had already vanished by the time he put pen to paper.