From 1827 through 1897, Paris was nothing if not politically and artistically tumultuous. The 1795 French Revolution had almost immediately degenerated into a bloodbath of executions for ideology's sake. Amid this chaos and violence, terrified French conservatives of all classes demanded order at any cost. The resulting dictatorship lasted until Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815.

Again and again over the next decades, France teetered between rebellion and repression. In the art world, the ideals of the Revolution grew out of the ashes as Romanticism blossomed after 1815. The fortunes of painters and writers rose and fell as liberal and republican schools of thought fought with bland conventionality and rigid classicism. The glorification of the individual and a renewed search for the truth of the human condition became the renewed concern of novelists, playwrights, musicians, and painters.

It is in 1827, at the peak of the Romantic movement, where Kay Nolte Smith's novel, A Tale of the Wind, begins. Here she assembles a cast of characters that includes desperate and filthy rag-pickers and the highest bourgeoisie. The story, centered in the world of the theatre, where the low and the high of society often met, weaves through the lives of several generations of Parisians as many citizens attempt to make real the cry of "Liberté, Égalite, Fraternité." The world of fictitious characters intertwines with the lives and works of the great artists of the time: Victor Hugo, Henri Matisse, Henrik Ibsen and Edmond Rostand, author of the 1897 Cyrano de Bergerac, for example.

Ms. Smith's greatest achievement is to demonstrate for the reader the revolutionary effect of great art on the world, and she could not have picked a more compelling setting. This was a period, after all, when the public was fully aware that art and ideas are connected, and that the connection effects the lives and dreams of every man, woman and child. While reading this novel, one can only feel regret that s/he was not alive during such a time.

But A Tale of the Wind is a joy to read for several other reasons. Smith's sympathetic characters demonstrate a point of view not often represented: they desire liberty, but are too devoted to the sanctity of individual rights to desire it at any cost: economic and political freedom must be secured for all, not just a select group of ideologues. Several characters feel horror at, and speak against, the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune even though they do not share the ideology, or condone the savage tactics, of the communists that are suppressed.

The remarkably strong and memorable personalities that populate this book are also very human. They are sometimes confused and often incorrect about the actions that they take. Many, however, not only attempt to live within the boundaries of their own personal moral code, but break through the strictures of convention to create a code that is interesting and compelling to us in the next century.

This is Kay Nolte Smith's best novel so far. Her voice is strong and her own. She, too, has broken from the moral and stylistic strictures of her literary mentor, Ayn Rand. She gives us the world as it is, in its entirety, even as she shows us a glimpse of how it might be. Her very human characters know darkness and light, pain and beauty, good and evil. They recognize, and exist within, what Smith calls a "harmony of opposites." One painter, Marc Vollard, worries about his attraction for the "dark, sad streak" of his lover's poetry. "In his own work," he thought, "he was mesmerized by light and its brilliance; why should he find his heart stirred by verbal images of night and misery and decay?" His lover believes that they are "two opposing and uncomplimentary halves of a single being…." Smith, unlike Rand, is able to believe that this is possible in a good man, and is able to acknowledge the varieties of experience necessary to be fully human.