After a year making postcards of Manhattan and Boston street scenes, which although admired and purchased don't make him much money, Lawrence and Joan head for their final destination, France. While exploring the hills of Provence in search of a medieval village to set up his art and craft shop, he meets, in her studio in just such a place, Séraphine, a fabric designer and painter who takes him under her wing. But as a leather worker and graphic artist in France Lawrence is no longer "the big fish in a little pond" he was in the Caribbean and finds prospects bleaker than imagined. Rather than depend on wise and kindly Séraphine (who is also an excellent cook) he moves to Paris to try his hand at a new trade: translating for Unesco. Working at home on a used typewriter, Lawrence is able to draw a collection of Paris postcards, inspired by the city's street market and legendary sites, as well as poets and minstrels and even the street-walkers of the legendary Rue Saint Denis. To his delight - and relief - the meticulously detailed cartoons strike a nostalgic nerve among the "thinking classes" and sell "comme des petits pains" (or hotcakes) in the boutiques of the Latin Quarter and Les Halles. Throughout this volume, which is an ode to the beauty of France, Lawrence "the 20th century humanist par excellence" recounts - with a wealth of photographs - his discovery of the ancient places of Provence and Burgundy, and the generous, glowing shapes of their Romanesque abbeys, with their sometimes crude but exuberantly vivid carvings and reliefs... The many changes Lawrence finds in Paris, after 18 years away, are detailed with the inquisitive spirit of the born, if untrained, historical chronicler - from new bridges replacing old ones over the Seine and the criminal removal from the heart of the city of the 19th century night market's graceful cast-iron and glass "umbrellas", to the dismaying results of the mythicized 1968 student riots, whose false promise of American-style liberation has, he sadly observes, created a corrosive vein of self-doubt into the proud perception which the French once had of their unique civilization...Lawrence Bohme's whimsically told but scrupulously faithful "personal history" of his first 41 years is entitled My Very Long Youth because "due to a force beyond my control I only started growing up, or calming down, after that age". His erratic wanderings throughout the Western World, in the four decades following the war in the midst of which Lawrence was born, have been enough "without wasting a single word" to fill sixteen "novel-length" parts or "books" which explore the scope of his wanderlust and his insatiable curiosity for humankind in general "and women in particular". The eclectic author - "a half-European, half-American child of the second half of the 20th century" - describes his opus as simultaneously "a retrospective diary, an eye-witness history book, an idiosyncratic collection of drawings and photographs, a one-way, slow-motion travel guide, a movie made up of stills and, to put it politely, a partially contrite confession of compulsive concupiscence"...