The diary of Agnes Herrick presents a firsthand view of social and cultural life in early twentieth-century Paris. At that time, forty-year-old Agnes Blackwell Herrick is the hostess at the American Embassy for her father-in-law, Ambassador Myron T. Herrick, the much celebrated "Friend of France." She had privileged access to events and some of the principal people involved in them. What she saw was perhaps a last echo of the Belle Époque and the first tremor of renewed national rivalries that contained the seeds of further struggle and war that lay ahead. It was a time of strenuous post-World War I negotiations between the Allies and Germany shared with a frenetic burst of artistic experimentation and the birth of Modernism. Agnes' social calendar records the relentless tempo of social and cultural life in the highest diplomatic circles as illustrated by selected entries from her diary. The book summarizes the diary and identifies the extraordinary assembly of political, cultural, intellectual, financial, and high society personalities who accepted the Ambassador's invitations to dinner. The detail and immediacy of Agnes' record add a fresh primary source for historians and a firsthand glimpse of a compelling and still relevant world.
