Mary McAuliffe, author of “Paris Discovered: Explorations in the City of Light,” will speak at Millsaps College on Tuesday, October 2, at 6:30 p.m. in the Leggett Center. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Gail Buzhart at 601-974-1310.
What did Paris look like nine centuries ago, when Peter Abélard was teaching rowdy students by day and making love to Héloïse by night? How had it changed by the time Jeanne d’Arc trained her army’s cannons on Paris’ city walls? Where can you find the tomb of the little lost dauphin, the heir of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette? McAuliffe answers these and many other questions in an illustrated talk about her Paris explorations, which have taken her from the top of Notre Dame to the medieval aqueducts that still lie beneath the city’s streets. She takes the audience with her as she discovers the sites along the Seine that inspired the first Impressionists, and finds the Paris that charmed Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. She also admits the audience into some of Paris’ secrets, such as a hidden medieval chapel, a long-lost river, a forgotten 19th-century railroad that encircles the city and a stairway that leads downward into passageways from long ago.
McAuliffe received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland and has taught at several universities, lectured at the Smithsonian Institution and published a book and articles on the Cold War. She has traveled extensively in France, and for the past seven years has been a regular contributor to “Paris Notes.” McAuliffe currently lives in Manhattan, but has been exploring Paris with her husband for more than 15 years. Like so many others, she is drawn to Paris by its beauty and culture, but what brings her back year after year is the extraordinary richness of its history. In particular, she enjoys sleuthing out new aspects of the City of Light, especially when her discoveries shed light on old quests, revealing unsuspected links and connections between the many stories this fascinating city has to tell. Her book, “Paris Discovered: Explorations in the City of Light,” was published in September 2006.
