Metrostop Paris : History from the City's Heart

The name of every Parisian metro station tells a story. In Metrostop Paris Gregor Dallas recounts a series of extraordinary but true tales about the city as he leads his readers around the metro. Both the armchair traveller and the visitor wil enjoy an illuminating journey in the company of a compelling storyteller and veteran of the city. The book includes visits to Paris catacombs at Hell's Gate, the literary cafes and old jazz cellars of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the seventeenth-century alleys of the Marais, along with trips to the Palais-Royal at the time of the Revolution and the world of opera during Claude Debussy's lifetime. Through the eyes of the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Dallas describes the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War and the intellectual wars that immediately followed. A visit to the futuristic Cit de la Science at La Villette prompts the story of the Marquis de Mores, the French cowboy and anti-semite, who was eventually murdered by tribesmen of the Sahara Desert in 1896. Outside the Jesuit church of Saint-Paul Dallas tells us about Gabriel de Montgomery, forgotten ancestor of Montgomery of Alamein, who accidentally killed his king just there and, after leading the Protestant armies against Catherine de Medicis, was executed on the Place de Greve. This exciting journey through time and space concludes at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery with the unknown tale of Oscar Wilde's strange involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, the greatest legal scandal of all time.

Gregor Dallas is an acclaimed historian of the ending of wars. He is the author of 1815: The Roads to Waterloo, 1918: War and Peace and Poisoned Peace: 1945 - The War That Never Ended, and has written as well on rural life in France, and on Clemenceau. Educated in Britain and the USA, he now lives near Paris.