F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, the beautiful Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, were among the most incandescent of the “bright young things,” expats who came to Paris in the Jazz Age.  The following is a passage taken from a letter from Zelda to Scott, written in 1930. Zelda’s lyrical prose captures with exquisite clarity the essence of the city and her own.

Was it fun in Paris? Who did you see there and was the Madeleine pink at five o’clock and did the fountains fall with delicacy into the framing of space in the Place de la Concorde, and did the blue creep out from behind the Colonnades of the rue de Rivoli through the grill of the Tuileries and was the Louvre gray and metallic in the sun and did the trees hang brooding over the cafés and were there lights at night and the click of saucers and the auto horns that play de Bussey [sic] …

Zelda and Scott in 1919, a year before they married.