Excerpt from The Love of Monsieur Wynne laughed. Gawd, man! He's givin' him his due. Aren't you, Ferrers? The captain scowled. I' faith I am. Two hundred guineas again last night. May the plague take him! Such luck is not in nature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

What sort of woman has a taste for middle-aged, married men? Ellie, twenty years old and living in Paris, leads a light and carefree life until she meets “Mister”—a married surgeon approaching middle age. Beginning with their frenzied affair in a hotel room in the fifteenth arrondissement, Monsieur details the clandestine Tuesday morning hotel meetings and fleeting phone calls spanning several months of sexual adventure. Generous with her body and never lacking erotic imagination (or partners—men and women), Ellie illuminates her deviations in a lucid, ferocious, and passionate tale. Often shocking but never gratuitous, Monsieur is, paradoxically, a coming-of-age story—her seduction of the married man and its devastating aftermath leaving Ellie older and wiser than she once was after their four-month affair comes to its unpredictable conclusion. At once a novel-confession and a description of the descent from passion to cruel fantasy, this is the disenchantment of a contemporary Lolita.

A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer. John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris--not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad. Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France--to its absurdities, its history, its ideals--but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.