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A stunning, imaginative novel about the fantastic architect of ParisBaron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who demolished and rebuilt Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century, was the first urbanist of the modern era--and possibly the greatest. He presided over 2 decades of riches, peace, and progress in a city the likes of which no person had ever seen before, with boulevards monumentally conceived and brilliantly lit, clean water, public transportation, and sewers that were the envy of every nation on earth. Yet there is a story that, on his deathbed, Haussmann wished all his work undone. "Would that it had died with me!" he is likely to have said. What's the secret of the baron's last regret?To answer this question, Haussmann tells the storyplot of Madeleine, a foundling who was raised in the magical, chaotic world that Haussmann destroyed; of de Fonce, one of the fantastic artistes démolisseurs who tore Paris down and sold its rubble as antiques; and of a three-sided affair that pits love against ambition, architecture against flesh, and the living Parisians against Haussmann's unbuilt masterpiece, the Railroad of the Dead. Although steeped ever sold, Paul LaFarge's Haussmann, or the Distinction is a novel not bound by fact; it is an account of the hidden, sometimes fantastical life of the nineteenth century, a work that will make readers think of Borges as well as Balzac; this can be a view of cities, of love, and of history itself from the other side of the mirror.
