As anyone who has spent time living in a Parisian garret will tell you, the romantic notion of it dies pretty quickly, especially during a sweltering summer or a teeth-chattering winter. The great French writer Honoré de Balzac’s own youthful experience of such straitened circumstances led to this evocative description in his 1831 novel, The Wild Ass’s Skin: “Nothing could be more sordid than this attic with its dirty yellow walls which smelt of poverty and seemed to await a needy scholar.”
Needy scholars, such as Lucien de Rubempré and Eugène de Rastignac, are a key human component of Balzac’s wonderful literary undertaking La Comédie Humaine, which consists of 91 individual works, including novels, short stories, and essays. But what of Paris itself?
