Paris When It Sizzled: Les Années Folles (The Crazy Years)
Location: Left Bank-St. Germain
Tour Duration: 2 1/2 Hours
Host: John Baxter
Price: 175 Euros*





"These are all personalized tours, tailored to suit your own itineraries, times, etc. They can be for just one person, a couple, a small family group or a group of friends.Prices may be adjusted depending on the number taking part in the tour."

* Paris walking tours can be found for as little as 20 euros in groups BUT a tour with John Baxter is like walking with Orson Welles without the beard–a larger than life, theatrical experience. When you stop at 27 rue de Fleuris you won’t just be told that Gertrude and Alice lived there but what Alice cooked, Hemingway observed, Joyce drank, Picasso painted and who flirted with whom at their Sunday salons. And an opium pipe spied in a shop window might prompt ten minutes on Jean Cocteau and opium usage during Les Années Folles

My girlfriend Ceciley and I had already been in Paris for 2 days when we met John Baxter for his Paris When It Sizzled tour.  After 2 1/2 hours with John, the city was transformed for us forever.  What he gives is more than the walking tour where someone points, 'And that happened there.'  What John gives is the city itself.  The culture, history, and beauty that breathes around every corner.  He is a true storyteller and a man of letters, art, and yes... wine.  Now, when I think about my first trip to Paris, I don't think about the Eifel Tower or the Louvre.  I think about the day with John Baxter.  To me, he is Paris."
 - Stephen Chbosky

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Paris has enjoyed many golden ages, but none so gorgeous as the 1920s. As Europe lit up again after the Great War, the City of Light drew people like a magnet. In particular, scores of writers fled stiflingly conservative Anglo-Saxon cultures in search of the intellectual, artistic and sexual freedom only the French capital could offer. Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Natalie Clifford Barney and their friends turned a few square miles on the Left Bank of the Seine into one of the richest art colonies of the 20th century.

About Your Guide
Author John Baxter has lived in the heart of literary Paris for fifteen years, and knows intimately every winding street, corner cafe and hidden courtyard. His knowledge of les années folles - the Crazy Years - becomes yours as he guides you around the haunts of these literary giants, recounting their stories with the same vivid style that illuminates his biographies of Woody Allen, Luis Bunuel and Stanley Kubrick, and his best-selling memoir We'll Always Have Paris. If you never shared an aperitif at La Coupole with Hemingway, borrowed a book from Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company or strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens with William Faulkner, this is the next best thing.