Ernest Hemingway · 1964 · exile
Ernest Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the twenties, written thirty years later and published after his death. He was poor, newly married and learning to write, and the book is really an address book - two flats, a rented room, a bookshop, a salon and a dozen cafes, nearly all of them inside one square mile of the Left Bank.
- 1Hotel d'Angleterre
Room 14, rue Jacob, in December 1921 - the first night in Paris for a twenty-two-year-old newspaperman and his wife, arriving with letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson and very little else.
- 274 rue du Cardinal Lemoine
The first flat: two rooms on the third floor, no hot water and no lavatory but a pail, above a bal musette. He calls it the poorest address in Paris, and the plaque there now says they were very poor and very happy.
- 3Place de la Contrescarpe
The square at the top of rue Mouffetard, with the Cafe des Amateurs on it - which he describes as the cesspool of the quarter - and the market street running down, where they did their shopping.
- 439 rue Descartes
Round the corner he rents a top-floor room purely to work in, in the hotel where Verlaine died - carrying the notebooks and pencils up, keeping the fire drawing, writing one true sentence and going on from there.
- 5Place Saint-Michel
The good cafe on the square where he writes the Michigan stories, orders rum St James and, when a story goes well, oysters and cold white wine - and where a girl with a face like a fresh-minted coin comes in out of the rain.
- 6Shakespeare and Company
Sylvia Beach's shop at 12 rue de l'Odeon, where he joins the lending library on credit because she trusts an address that could not have been poorer - and reads his way through Turgenev, Tolstoy and Lawrence.
- 727 rue de Fleurus
Gertrude Stein's drawing room, hung with pictures nobody else was buying, where he is fed cakes and eau-de-vie and told about writing and about his own lost generation - until they fall out over things not said aloud.
- 8Gare de Lyon
Hadley packs everything he has written into a valise to bring to him in Lausanne, and it is stolen at the station - originals and carbons together. It is the single worst thing in the book and he takes two chapters to say so.
- 9113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
The second flat, over a sawmill, with the whine of the saw and the smell of cut wood coming up all day - and Ezra Pound round the corner, and the boxing, and the racing at Auteuil and Enghien.
- 10La Closerie des Lilas
The nearest good cafe to the flat and the one he does his real work in - a saucer of cafe creme, a notebook and two pencils, Marshal Ney's statue outside, and a gold plaque on his table there to this day.
- 11Le Dome
Crowded with models who had worked, painters who had worked until the light went, writers who had finished a day's work for better or worse, and drinkers and characters, some of whom he knew and some who were only decoration.
- 12La Rotonde
The Montparnasse crossroads: three big cafes within fifty yards of each other, all of them full of people being seen, and Hemingway rather pleased with himself for preferring the one further up the boulevard.
- 13Le Select
Another of the Vavin corner cafes, and part of the geography of a working day - breakfast in one, an afternoon's writing in another, and an evening among people he is already sharpening his pen on.
- 14Dingo Bar
10 rue Delambre, where Scott Fitzgerald walks in and introduces himself, praises Hemingway's work extravagantly, asks whether he slept with his wife before marrying her, and then turns white and passes out.
- 15Michaud's
The expensive restaurant on the corner of rue Jacob and rue des Saints-Peres, where Joyce ate with his family - and where Fitzgerald raises the question that ends with the two of them inspecting him in the lavatory.
- 16The Louvre
He walks Fitzgerald over to look at the statues, to settle by comparison a question about anatomy that Zelda had put in his head - one of the odder errands in twentieth-century literature, and told absolutely straight.
- 17Brasserie Lipp
A distingue of cold beer, potatoes in oil and a cervelas with mustard sauce, eaten on the bench against the mirror - and the passage everyone quotes when they want to explain what this book does with food.
- 18Les Deux Magots
Drinks with James Joyce, and the place where the quarter came to be looked at - close enough to Lipp that a bad afternoon could be moved from one to the other without much walking.
- 19The Jardin du Luxembourg
He walks through the gardens rather than the streets because there is nothing to smell on the way, and looks at the Cezannes in the museum on an empty stomach - deciding hunger is good discipline and Cezanne knew about it.
- 20Schruns
The winters are spent in the Vorarlberg, skiing with a pioneer of high mountain touring and revising The Sun Also Rises - and the second Schruns winter is where he dates the beginning of the end of his first marriage.
- 21Lyon
Scott Fitzgerald asks him along to collect a car left behind in Lyon, then fails to arrive on the agreed train - the beginning of the funniest and most merciless portrait in the book.
- 22Macon
They drive north in a car with no roof, stopping repeatedly for rain and for Fitzgerald's conviction that he is dying of congestion of the lungs - treated with a thermometer, whisky and diminishing patience.
- 23The Ritz
In 1956 the hotel returns two trunks he left in the basement in 1930, full of the notebooks he kept in those cafes - and the old man in Cuba writes them up into this, and there is never any ending to Paris.