When Paris was a myth: the nostalgia for Europe of the great traveler James Salter. Salter lived in Paris one winter in the 1960s, in a wedge-shaped hotel overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery, the L'Aiglon.
Next door lived Luis Buñuel, then in his sixties, in what I assumed was a suite, and his pointy lizard-skin shoes were left at the door late at night to be polished. For me, this was the Paris of the Left Bank and the life lived there was that of James Jones and Irwin Shaw.