For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning . Picasso was there with his high whinnying spanish giggle , as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me . A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein s own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by the American in Paris.