A Night at the Majestic

A Night at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hine. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780571220090.

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.