Stanley Loomis (21 December 1922 – 19 December 1972) was the author of four books on French history: Du Barry (1959), Paris in the Terror (1964), A Crime of Passion (1967), and The Fatal Friendship (1972). His books have been published in eight languages and reprinted numerous times. Biography Stanley Pennock Loomis was born in New York City in 1922, the eldest of three sons of an industrial chemist and businessman, Chauncey C. Loomis, and his wife Elizabeth (née McLanahan). He grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and attended the Lenox School in Lenox, Massachusetts. He studied English at Columbia University, but his studies were interrupted by the war. He was trained in Japanese interpretation and served as a translator and intelligence officer in the Pacific. He was in Japan at the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945. According to his obituary in the New York Times, his “interest in French literature began when he was a soldier in World War II. Between air raids on Okinawa, he read the 18th-century memoirs of the Duc de St. Simon.” He returned to Columbia after the war and completed his B.A. in 1948. and obtained an additional M.A. in English. After graduating, he spent three years in France. Before settling into a writing career, he pursued a number of interests, including “working for a publisher, studying international trade in Arizona, even buying and selling a few paintings in Europe.” A biographical note in the Saturday Review states: “He pursued his study of eighteenth-century France in much the same way his sophisticated figures lived their expensive lives: as a highly refined form of entertainment.” This “entertainment” became his life’s work. He wrote his first book, a biography of Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, after returning to the United States. It was published by Lippincott in 1959. He married Virginia Lindsley Gignoux in 1960 and they had a son, Craig Putnam Loomis, in 1961. In 1965, he and his family began to spend the winter months in Paris. They lived first on the Quai Anatole France and later on the rue d’Anjou. He also spent time at the Chateau de Missery in Burgundy, a property belonging to a cousin. In addition to his books, he wrote occasional articles and book reviews and offered tours to visiting American friends of some of the less-well-known corners of Paris and France. He died in the