In this mesmerizing examination of Delacroix’s crowning masterwork, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel , and of Saint-Sulpice, the grand church that houses it, Jean-Paul Kauffmann reveals the city of Paris in an entirely new way. With the same insight and understanding he brought to his National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated The Black Room at Longwood , in The Angel of the Left Bank Jean-Paul Kauffmann confronts humanity’s struggle with God. His muse is Jacob Wrestling with the Angel , Eugène Delacroix’s “spiritual testimony” and certainly one of his masterpieces, a painting that portrays one of the most enigmatic episodes in Genesis.