"A writer and an art historian, a Jew, and a sybarite who craves her daily dose of sensuality, Lipton cannot escape the darker side of French life. In this passionate blend of autobiography and cultural history, love and sex and art collide with hatred, withering French xenophobia, and death. How does Paris, with all its faults, remain not only the most visited tourist destination in the world, but also the locus of endless sexual fantasy and the very image of the good life for Americans, for Eunice Lipton?" "Stirring the senses and challenging the mind, Lipton explores how her Eastern European father lured her to France across his fantasies, and then how she surrendered to the food, the textures and smells, the art, and the astonishingly maternal French state, only to later learn to what extent her father had lied to her. She is forced to confront the ferocious anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair that lay beneath the dazzling light of Impressionism; the sneering racial disdain of France's Roaring Twenties; and the unspeakable poverty of peasant life that paid for the voluptuous luxury of eighteenth-century Versailles. And how can a Jewish woman forgive France for its betrayal of its Jews to the Nazis?" "Lipton, one of our most respected cultural historians, dissects her love-hate relationship with France, transporting the Francophile in all of us back to that first love, and then way beyond to something startlingly new."--Jacket.