Footprints in Paris
  • Published: 3 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9781446419403
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384
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Footprints in Paris

A Few Streets, A Few Lives

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EBook
3 May 2010
Paperback
3 May 2010
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A unique book about the Left Bank and five generations of a family - all of whom left their footprints in the same narrow streets, and all of whom found refuge and rejuvenation in Paris.

Gillian Tindall is well known for her ability to breathe a passionate life into the generations of those who have walked the earth before us. Here, using a handful of lives, she evokes the texture and atmosphere of a hidden Paris which has survived against all the odds of time and chance. Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its magnetic field people who have variously found there education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret garden, even a different identity.

Five individuals, all related in some way, reveal a web of human feeling and experiences across two centuries. There is the young doctor who walked from Edinburgh to Paris at the time of Napoleon's downfall; the self-made Victorian businessman who traded with the brash capital of the Second Empire; his reserved son who found in the old stones of Paris a refuge from his fraught childhood; Maud, the archetypal English spinster, who somehow managed to construct an alternatative experience in Paris; and Julia , young and desperate, who found her own unlikely salvation there in a very different era.

Gillian Tindall brings Paris alive - whether it's the network of streets that form the Left Bank, the resonance of 'Bohemia' and its garrets, cafes and artists, 'Gay Paree' with its music halls and courtesans or the past chroniclers of the city such as Zola, George du Maurier and Orwell. But featured far more than the famous, are the unsung citizens for whom Gillian Tindall has such empathy.
  • Published: 3 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9781446419403
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Gillian Tindall

Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. Her latest book, The Tunnel through Time, traced the history of the Crossrail route, the forthcoming ‘Elizabeth’ line. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.

portrait photo of Gillian Tindall

Also by Gillian Tindall

The Pulse Glass
The Tunnel Through Time
Three Houses, Many Lives
The House By The Thames
The Man Who Drew London
Celestine
See all

Praise for Footprints in Paris

An enterprise of formidable research and enviable lightness of touch

Anita Brookner, The Spectator

Charming disinterment of a lost 19th - and 20th -century Paris...An antidote to the history of great men and events

The Guardian Saturday Review, SUMMER READS

delightful book invites reflection, speculation, argument, and almost every page also summons memories

Allan Massie, Literary Review

It's a fascinating walking tour of old Paris, studded with humour and sympathetic glimpses into several lives that have resisted the microscope of history

Tim Martin, Telegraph

The book's true strength lies in its writer's abiding, for-better-for-worse attachment to her city of the heart

Jonathan Keates, Sunday Telegraph

This book is a personal memoir, a history of the left bank of Paris and an endlessly compelling tale of a family who lived in and out of Paris through two centuries of war, conflict and great politics...Nostalgia is of course a key trope in Parisian history and this book, richly textured and beautifully written, is a wonderful addition to that canon

Andrew Hussey, History Today

Tindall writes of a lost Paris with a quiet eloquence that is all her own, combining scrupulous honesty with a compassionate imagination and an eye for memorable detail

Miranda Seymour, Guardian

Tindall... can create vivid portraits out of a few misty pixels

Graham Robb, Sunday Times

Tindall's alertness to detail and brimming intelligence are consistently engaging

Frances Spalding, The Independent