Mary McAuliffe
Twilight of the Belle Epoque
The Paris of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Renault, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, and Their Friends through the Great War
In Twilight of the Belle Epoque, Mary McAuliffe portrays Paris in full flower at the turn of the twentieth century.
Creative dynamos such as Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan set their respective circles on fire with a barrage of revolutionary visions and discoveries. Such dramatic breakthroughs were not limited to the arts or sciences, as innovators and entrepreneurs such as Louis Renault, André Citroën, Paul Poiret, and so many others — including those magnificent men and women in their flying machines — emphatically demonstrated. But all was not well in this world remembered in hindsight as a golden age, and wrenching struggles between Church and state as well as between haves and have-nots shadowed these years, underscored by the ever-more-ominous drumbeat of the approaching Great War.
Praise
"McAuliffe has a gift for making history feel immediate and alive. Twilight of the Belle Epoque is a sweeping, richly detailed portrait of Paris at its most creative and most vulnerable."
"A dazzling cast of characters — Picasso, Proust, Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein — brought together in a narrative that captures the end of an era with both elegance and urgency."