Dan Franck's book covers the first thirty years of the twentieth century, when Montmartre and Montparnasse were filled with glorious subversives who were inventing modern art and the literary language of the century: Picasso the gentle anarchist, Apollinaire the eroticist, Modigliani and his women, Max Jacob and his men, the fiery Aragon, the solitary Soutine, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, Andre Breton and many others. They came from many different countries.They were painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, and began seminal movements such as fauvism, cubism and surrealism. Their lives were as flamboyant as their work; they were hedonists, believed in free love and broke all the rules of conventional Parisian society. They were and always will be the heroes of the Bohemian period: a magnificent era whose influences and movements still reverberate at the turn of the twenty-first century.