A Night to Remember

You certainly can't tell this book by its cover — a portrait of five men, in formal smoking jackets and white ties, at the champagne-and-cigar end of a meal. They might be any well-heeled diners, friends, perhaps, or business colleagues. But these guests at a midnight supper in Paris' fashionable Majestic Hotel in May 1922 were the best-known artists of the age: impresario Serge Diaghilev, writers James Joyce and Marcel Proust, painter Pablo Picasso and composer Igor Stravinsky. Ostensibly they were there to celebrate the premier of Stravinsky's ballet Le Renard, performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The real reason: so a...