The famous poet of the French Resistance movement of the late war, Louis Aragon, had chosen as setting for his best novel, Paris and the decadent artistic groups. Aragon had never before depicted so arrestingly the strange fascination and repulsion of Paris, as in this story of the young Aurelien, just back from the trenches, ripe for his consuming love affair with Berenice. The author weaves the web of a passionate, frustrated romance into a woof of sordid business intrigues, and runs through both a shimmering satirical thread of comment on the aesthetic and cultural life of the city. The novel, originally published in 1944, is highly sophisticated.