fs without the Parisians', for there would be no Parisian cafs without the Parisians but then, as we will see in a later chapter, scoring points off the French is a worldwide sport. Charles Lindbergh became a hero when he landed at Le Bourget airfield in 1927 and, for more than a century, the City of Light was the magnet for artists and writers, and for political exiles ranging from White Russians and Jews, to Communists and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in their memento-filled villa in the Bois de Boulogne. Reporting on the Dreyfus case for a Vienna newspaper set Theodor Herzl on the road to Zionism. The men who were to become Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot studied Marxism and Leninism in France's capital. For decades, Paris was at the cutting-edge of modernity. One of the troop of foreign writers and artists who came to live there, Walter Benjamin, called Paris the capital of the nineteenth century; a bit later, another resident foreigner, Gertrude Stein, dubbed it `the place where the twentieth century was'. It was home to Picasso and Modigliani, and a last refuge for Oscar Wilde and Marlene Dietrich. Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald sized up their penises in a Left Bank caf lavatory. Paris and France adopted Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet. Fats Waller got a chance to play the `God box' in the organ loft of Notre Dame, and jazz musicians fleeing American racism found a home from home in the Htel Louisiane on the Rue de Buci. In a different musical mode, Jim Morrison's grave is still a pilgrimage spot for Doors fans on the northern slopes of the city. A Paris publisher was the first to print Joyce and Nabokov. George Gershwin sailed home in 1928 with a collection of Paris taxi-horns to use in An American in Paris. Eugne Ionesco and Samuel Beckett wrote in the language of their adopted country; asked why he lived in Paris, the Irish playwright replied: `Well, you know, if I was in Dublin I would just be sitting around in a ...
