For years, Garson Lazarre has been chronicling the lives of Paris' ex-pat community from his bar stool at a left bank cafe. After his notorious disappearance, friends salvaged his journals - a fascinating, entertaining, sometimes hilarious, often touching account of the lives of the city's most eccentric characters. Meet serial divorcee Barbie Rushworth, who married her way from a South London pub to Versailles, Hollywood legend Kay Dorsey, and society gigolo Rudi Rivoli and discover the secret past of Boulevard Sam Michel and the many faces and birthdates of former child star Bonnie Vale in a dozen short stories. Laurence Phillips, himself a veteran chronicler of French Life and former Paris correspondent, takes many a gentle swipe at the contemporary obsession with celebrity in a warm and satirical evocation of a city he has loved for a lifetime.