Volume 52, Number 11 · June 23, 2005
The Pleasure of Their Company
By Peter France
The Age of Conversation
by Benedetta Craveri, translated from the Italian by Teresa Waugh
New York Review Books, 488 pp., $30.00
Not long after World War I, the art critic Clive Bell set out to define and defend the 'civilization' his nation had allegedly been fighting for. Looking back from Bloomsbury to Voltaire and beyond, he picked out what were by common consent three summits of civilized living: Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy, and France between the mid-seventeenth century and the Revolution. The last of these he calls 'that charming age,' speaking of the 'peculiar deliciousness' of Parisian society. By 1928, this image of pre-Revolutionary France as an exquisitely sociable world had a long history. Much nearer the time, Germaine de Staël, exiled by Napoleon, had evoked in her De l'Allemagne the lost pleasures of French conversation:
Review, 3999 words
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