Edmund White was forty-three years old when he moved to Paris in 1983. He spoke no French & knew just two people in the entire city, but soon discovered the anxieties & pleasures of mastering a new culture. White fell passionately in love with Paris, its beauty in the half-light & eternal mists; its serenity compared with the New York he had known. Intoxicated & intellectually stimulated by its culture, he became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet, wrote lives of Marcel Proust & Arthur Rimbaud. Frequent trips across the Channel to literary parties in London begot friendships with Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis & many others. When he left, fifteen years later, to return to the US, he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio & TV, & as a journalist had made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves St Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He`d also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through whom he`d come to a deeper understanding of French life. Inside a Pearl vividly recalls those fertile years, & offers a brilliant examination of a city & a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.