Paris, 1885. As Victor Hugo's funeral procession winds from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon before two million mourners, a new era is taking shape. In the cabarets, circuses, brothels, studios, salons and boulevards of the Right Bank, a hugely diverse crowd of artists, writers, performers, dealers and patrons cross paths, collide and together start to invent modern culture.
A very young Marcel Proust drifts through the salons while Freud arrives from Vienna in search of a method. Rodin and Camille Claudel circle each other as lovers and rivals. Debussy and Satie rethink music while Sarah Bernhardt rules the stage. Best-selling novelist Émile Zola publishes J'accuse in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of treason. Model and painter Suzanne Valadon, poet Anna de Noailles and patron Winnaretta Singer emerge as central figures. Degas and Mary Cassatt become close allies, while the English clown Foottit and the Cuban-born Chocolat become stars. Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin encounter Japanese prints that transform art, while Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan change our understanding of dance and movement.
As the century begins to turn, Freud publishes On the Interpretation of Dreams, Proust starts to write his modernist masterpiece, and a new generation, including Picasso, Colette, Rilke and Ravel, emerge into a world where department stores, electric lights, photography and early cinema are creating an exhilarating new mass culture of speed.
Written as street-level fresco and drawing on a vast range of letters, diaries and memoirs, Right Bank reveals the unexpected connections that made Belle Époque Paris the birthplace for a new way of experiencing modern life.
PRAISE FOR LEFT BANK
'Combines rich and subtle intellectual history with all the pleasures of a great soap opera' Tom Holland
'A tremendous achievement' William Boyd
'Hugely enjoyable, quick-witted and richly anecdotal' The Times