Publisher's Synopsis
Baudelaire and Manet, both slightly overcome with absinthe, argue noisily about the attractive bar maid in a Manet painting with whom Baudelaire has fallen in love. George Sand reveals personal thoughts about her relationship with Frederic Chopin and why she ignores his funeral, while lunching with Gustave Flaubert, her late life close friend. Jean Cocteau gives a brilliant interview to the wrong American magazine. Jean Paul Sartre explains to Simone de Beauvoir his reason for refusing the Nobel Prize and they leave Lutece hurriedly to announce it to the press. Victor Hugo weeps publicly at lunch upon learning that his mistress of fifty years is about to die. That diminutive Toulouse Lautrec would do battle with giant Erik Satie about the style of his music in the middle of a beauty contest organized by artists Kees van Dongen and Foujita seems logical.. That Orson Welles, lunching at Le Grand Lutece in Paris, responds provocatively to written questions from his home town high school newspaper is not what one might expect. . In passing, there is Lenin - note the spelling. V. not J. - having a spot of afternoon tea. And Balzac, Colette, Maria Callas, Curnonsky.... Toulouse Lautrec posed to Oscar Wilde at their last meeting, at Lutece, 'will those who come after us see more in our work than even we do? Or will we just be forgotten?' What do you think?
