"All Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilisation comes upon you by contact with an older woman, by revolution, by army discipline, by any escape or any subjection, and then you are civilised and life goes on normally in a latin way."

Gertrude Stein's Paris France, published in 1940 on the day Paris fell to Nazi Germany, is a witty account of Stein's life in France, and the perfect introduction to her work.