Twenty Centuries of Paris

Here is a city that has been everything: Roman outpost, medieval monastery, revolutionary capital, imperial throne, bohemian paradise. Mabell S. C. Smith traces two thousand years of Paris with the reverent eye of a historian who understands that stones remember. From the Celtic tribes who first settled the Île de la Cité to the boulevards Haussmann carved through the old medieval quarters, this is the story of how a muddy settlement on the Seine became the light by which the world measures civilization. Smith writes with early twentieth-century elegance about the Romans who named it Lutetia, the barbarian invasions, the coronation of Charlemagne, the bloodshed of the Revolution, and the romantic poets who made the Left Bank a state of mind. This is Paris as the Parisians themselves have understood it: not a single city but a palimpsest, each age writing over the last while somehow preserving everything that came before. For anyone who has walked these streets and wondered what ghosts walk beside them.