City of light... and dark

The City of Light is also the city of the night — the city of the poor, outcasts, criminals, prostitutes, eccentrics and the wilfully nonconforming. TP O’Mahony leafs through Luc Sante’s salute to his beloved Paris

ON a visit to Paris two years ago, I bought a Juliette Greco CD in a secondhand shop on Boulevard San Michel. Now a very old woman (she was born in 1927), she was for me in the 1960s the very epitome of the bohemian lifestyle I associated with post-World War II Paris.

Perhaps this was in part because I was for a time in thrall to the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and his companion Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex (first published in 1949).