Author(s): Richard Davenport-Hines

Biography & Memoir

One May night in 1922, in a grand hotel in Paris, five of the greatest artists of the twentieth-century sat down to supper. It would be the only time that novelists Joyce and Proust, the young painter Picasso, choreographer Diaghilev and the composer Stravinsky were in a room together. Each of these exponents of early twentieth-century modernism was at the peak of his creative powers, and of all of them, Proust was enjoying the most spectacular success. Yet within six months he would be dead.

A Night at the Majestic evokes the luxury and glamour of early-twentieth-century Paris, the intellectual achievement of the modernist movement and the gossip, intrigue and scandal of aristocratic France.