While Paris Danced

by Patricia Wright

Paris in 1919 is the most exciting, the most dissolute, and the most frenetic city in the world. When influenza lands Eve Ottoway, an inexperienced American girl, at the splendid Daunay family home on the Champs-Elysees, she discovers a life she never dreamed existed. A life of glamour, elegance, delirium, blackmail, and drugs; of Presidents and Prime Ministers striving to negotiate peace while the hysteria of a nation nearly destroyed by war explodes in the streets. And only a few miles to the east the ruined lands begin. In Paris hey dance, while revolution, chaos, and lawlessness sweep Europe.

To Eve Ottoway, Paris is also the city where she wants to establish her fortune, a city of love and of marriage to a stranger. To Rick Dwyer, Washington newsman, it is the place where peace is destroyed; to Hugo von Kobis, an elegant return to civilization after the squalor of war, where he must work to save Germany from ruin. To Guy Saulx it holds the horror of no peace at all, when war has destroyed everything except his life.

The story moves from Norfolk in England, to West Prussia and the Rhine but always returns to Paris - the alluring and feminine city where for those few incredible months the history of the world was molded, and where Eve Ottoway struggles to understand herself, her responsibilities, and her heart.

402 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1982