Foreign News: Memory Lane

Many a paunchy, jowly citizen of U.S. suburbia, when he thinks of his youth, remembers Alice Prin. For Alice, with the heavy purple rouge over the surrealist green powder, Alice, with the bright crimson cupid bow hiding her thin upper lip and the spit curl embellishing her low forehead, was the toast (to put it delicately) of Paris in the days when Expatria infested the Left Bank.

They knew her not as Alice, but more romantically as Kiki. Though she was flamboyantly real and fabulously full-blown, she was to most of the artists, revolutionaries,...