A Brief, Largely Unreliable Guide to Hemingway’s Paris
There is a particular kind of person who arrives in Paris clutching a paperback copy of A Moveable Feast with the spine already broken at the good bits, and I am sorry to report that for one humid week in my fifties I was that person. I had come to walk where Hemingway walked, to drink where Hemingway drank, and to sit, pen poised, in the cafés where Hemingway allegedly produced deathless prose between bouts of arm-wrestling and lying about Harold Loeb. What I mostly did was get lost, spend €14 on a coffee the size of a thimble, and develop blisters of genuinely historic proportions. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Getting There and Lowering Your Expectations
The first thing to understand about literary Paris is that almost none of it is where you think it is, and a great deal of it is now a branch of a mobile phone shop. Hemingway lived, between roughly 1921 and 1928, in a series of apartments of escalating respectability, the most famous being above a bal musette (a sort of accordion-powered dance hall) on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. He described the surrounding neighbourhood as poor but happy, which is the kind of thing people say about a place precisely because they have the option of leaving it for a villa in Key West, which is exactly what he did.
The building is still there. There is a plaque. You will stand in front of the plaque for approximately ninety seconds, photograph it, with your Leica IIIc, feel briefly that you have communed with greatness, and then notice you are blocking the doorway of someone trying to take out their recycling.
The Cafés, or: How to Pay €11 to Sit Where a Sad Man Once Sat
Hemingway’s Paris ran on coffee, cheap white wine, and an almost industrial quantity of self-mythologising, and the engine room of all of this was the café. The essential pilgrimage sites are these:
La Closerie des Lilas, on the boulevard du Montparnasse, where Hemingway claimed to have written much of The Sun Also Rises in six weeks, fuelled by café crème and, one suspects, a determination to make everyone he ever met aware of this fact. Today there is a little brass nameplate marking “his” spot at the bar. There are, I should mention, a suspicious number of “his” spots scattered across Paris, enough that Hemingway would have needed to be in roughly eleven places simultaneously, which, given the drinking, cannot be ruled out.
Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore, the duelling intellectual cafés of Saint-Germain, where the prices are now calibrated to extract money from people exactly like me — that is, people who want to feel like Hemingway but lack the foresight to have done so in 1924, when a coffee cost roughly the modern equivalent of a stern look.
The thing nobody tells you is that Hemingway spent a great deal of his café time being broke, hungry, and faintly resentful of everyone more successful than him, which in Paris in the 1920s was a target-rich environment. He wrote movingly about being so poor he had to skip lunch, then walked past the Musée du Luxembourg to look at Cézannes on an empty stomach because — he claimed — hunger sharpened his appreciation of the paintings. I tried this. It did not sharpen my appreciation of anything except the location of the nearest boulangerie.
Shakespeare and Company: A Note on Confusion
You will want to visit Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookshop, and you will be at least partly visiting the wrong one. The original — Sylvia Beach’s shop, which lent Hemingway books on credit and published the unpublishable Ulysses when no one else would touch it — stood on the rue de l’Odéon and closed during the Occupation, never to reopen. The lovely, ramshackle, cat-infested shop opposite Notre-Dame that bears the name today is a delightful but entirely separate establishment, christened in homage in the 1960s.
This will not stop several hundred people a day from photographing it as though Hemingway himself might emerge from the poetry section, and I include myself in that number, because, if nothing else, I am a hypocrite of the first order.
The Hemingway Bar at the Ritz
No tour is complete without a visit to the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz, where you may purchase a cocktail for a sum of money that would have kept the actual Hemingway in macon village and oysters for a fortnight. The bar trades enthusiastically on the legend that Hemingway “liberated” it in August 1944, arriving with a band of irregulars and demanding a round of martinis for everyone — a story that is roughly forty percent true and one hundred percent excellent for cocktail sales. It is a beautiful room. The drinks are superb. You will feel briefly magnificent, then receive the bill and remember that you are not, in fact, a celebrated war correspondent but a man who got lost near the Panthéon earlier that same afternoon.
A Closing Thought
The strange truth about following Hemingway around Paris is that the city he wrote about was already half-invented by the time he wrote about it — a young man’s grief-tinted memory, assembled decades later as his life fell apart, polished into something far cleaner and braver and hungrier than the messy original. The Paris in the book never quite existed. Which is, when you think about it, the most Parisian thing imaginable.
Go anyway. Bring comfortable shoes, low expectations, a battered Leica, and more money than you think you’ll need. And if a man at the next café table tells you he once landed a 1,000-pound marlin and wrote a novel in a weekend, smile, nod, and quietly move tables
