Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 192 pages; $28. Chatto & Windus; £14.99
The House of Fragile Things. By James McAuley.
Yale University Press; 320 pages; $30 and £25
Göring s Man in Paris. By Jonathan Petropoulos.
Yale University Press; 456 pages; $37.50 and £25
O
N DECEMBER 21ST 1936 artistic luminaries gathered in the courtyard of an elegant town house in Paris, waiting for the speeches to begin. Number 63 rue de Monceau had belonged to a banker called Moïse de Camondo; his wife Irène, the daughter of another banking family, had as a girl been painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, her red hair tied with a blue ribbon. In wealthy middle-age Camondo had torn down the house his parents built when they emigrated to Paris from Constantinople, and sold or given away everything they brought with them, even the precious Judaica.