The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire were long gone and the last attempt of the Bourbons to restore the dynasty had been a fiasco. It fell on old and spent Marquis de Lafayette to promote the new French sovereign at the Hôtel de Ville: This were extraordinary times. Victor Hugo, Honoré Balzac, Chateaubriand, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, and the Goncourts were best sellers in Paris at the same time. Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Gounod, Wagner, were all making music and competing for the same public. The world of ideas was flourishing. In the midst of all this, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and his wife María del Carmen moved to Paris and soon welcomed as their guests four of the finest minds in Cuba, the last remaining Spanish colony in the Americas: Domingo del Monte and his wife Rosa, Miguel Aldama and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. This is the extraordinary story of the time they spent together in the City of Lights.