What creaks and smells? Rattles and groans? Is misty, wind-swept and blisteringly hot, sometimes all in the same day? Can murmur seductively, but from time to time shriek, or moan in ecstasy? Is exasperatingly disinclined to admit one to intimacy, yet, just as it does, can transform itself with a swirl and a flash into a new creature, utterly unrecognisable?
Give up?

The answer is Paris – or at least the Paris on which David Downie lifts the curtain in his book PARIS, PARIS. JOURNEY INTO THE CITY OF LIGHT.

Lifting the curtain (in some cases before the people inside expect it) is very much what this book is about. While Downie tips a respectful nod to the city of cordon bleu cuisine, the Louvre and Orsay museums, the shops of the grands boulevards and the boutiques of his own quartier, the old Jewish ghetto of the Marais, he’s more interested in what’s happening behind those façades.

The chic Place de Vosges, for instance. What’s it really like to live in those 17th century hotels particuliares and to look down on the cafes under the colonnade where movie stars take coffee and fashion models prowl? Well, for some, not much fun, since many tenants inherited their homes generations back, and can’t or won’t renovate. Persuading one to invite him in, Downie describes being “led from floor to sagging floor by the pavilion’s unwashed, unshaved, ornery owner, who scowled out of the broken windowpanes and cursed his inheritance. ‘You think it’s beautiful’, he shouted over and over, ‘you like the view? I hate it here. I hate it!”

Downie’s Paris differs fundamentally from the Paris glimpsed by the tourist. He watches with a mixture of astonishment, amusement and dismay as the city, responding to the seasons, to political fashion, and to waves of prosperity and recession, shifts and changes like the living creature it is. A café can close at the beginning of August as Parisians flee to the country, to re-open on their return with its old varnished wood and velour interior replaced, not by steel and glass, but by another kind of varnished wood, a differently coloured velour, and nothing to suggest both haven’t been there for a century. There are even paints that recreate exactly the yellow-brown of a ceiling stained by decades of smoke from unfiltered Gauloises Bleus. Names too can change with the fortunes of a district. One café in our arrondissement closed as “Le Mandarin” , to reopen as the more subtly snob “Le Mondrian“ . Downie quotes a Parisian telling a friend, “If you come back to Paris in two years, you won’t recognise it” ; something we’ve all said – except that he was talking in 1608.

One could not hope for a more authoritative introduction to the city on the Seine. Helped immeasurably by the atmospheric photographs of Alison Harris, Downie guides us through a Paris where, as in the real world, art shares a bed with money, and history and politics co-mingle with myth and romance. He demonstrates that plus ca change… The more this city changes, the more it stays the same – which is what makes Paris, and this book, so exhilirating. Don’t leave home without it.

PARIS, PARIS. JOURNEY INTO THE CITY OF LIGHT

JOHN BAXTER is the author of more than forty books, including biogaphies of Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick and Robert DeNiro. A Parisian for the last fifteen years, he writes about his life there in A POUND OF PAPER: CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK ADDICT (St Martins) and the forthcoming WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS; SEX AND LOVE IN THE CITY OF LIGHT (HarperCollins Perennial) .