ABSTRACT
In Paris Peasant, published in 1926, Louis Aragon describes a visit he made
with two friends, André Breton and Marcel Noll, to the Parc des Buttes-
Chaumont, on the north-eastern fringes of Paris. Chased there by boredom,
they roamed through the park after dark on a spring evening. Both to them and
to its nineteenth-century creators, the park seemed a place of constant
experiment, a place heavy with possibility (see Figure 1.1).1
