Paris: Through a Literary Lense

Bonjour les lecteurs !

I have arrived back on native soil and have brought my stories and adventures from afar.

For those of you who weren’t aware, last week I was in France visiting one of my dear friends and enjoying a different part of the world. During my trip, I joined a literary tour of Paris. We started at three famous literary cafés, visited Descartes’ tomb, ventured through the Latin Quarter, and ended up at the sole English bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Company.

The Boulevard Saint-Germain, named for the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which dates back to the Middle Ages, has a rich history of nobility and nightlife. In the 17th Century, the Saint-Germain quarter housed many aristocrats. By the turn of the 19th century, many of the noble houses relocated to the upper bourgeoisie on the Boulevard Saint-Honore or the Champs-Elysées. After the relocation of the aristocracy, Boulevard Saint-Germain became desolate. However, due to the Abbey and the University near by, the boulevard didn’t stay quiet for long.

Shortly after World War I, Paris, specifically Monpernasse, experienced a flood of Americans. Many writers, painters, and philosophers came to Paris to avoid prohibition in the States and take advantage of the freedom the city offered. From the 1930s on, Saint-Germain was associated with its nightlife, cafés, and students.

Monpernasse maintained its artistic patrons simply out of convenience. The Abbey provided many resources for artists and writers. All of the printers and editors nearby were due to the University. Many famous writers intertwined and lived in the city—Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camu, and Samuel Beckett, just to name a few.

Café de Flore, Café Les Deux Magots, and Brasserie Lipp were, and still are, literary cafés on the corner of Saint-Germain across from what is left of the Abbey, the bell tower. These cafés and the Saint-Germain quarter were the center of the existentialist movement associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

In their earlier years, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald would drink and write in Café de Flore, but after a squabble related to the publishing of A Moveable Feast, which is based entirely off of their lives in Paris, Hemingway moved his writing hub next door to Café Les Deux Magots. Now, before any of you try to guess what “magots” translates to, let me just tell you: les deux magots means two hidden treasures.

Auguste Boulat bought the business in 1914.The previous owners left behind two stocky figurines from Asia. Later Boulat found out these figurines were priceless antique statues. He named the café after these statues and they still hang inside, gazing over the room. Hemingway was given a room in the café where he would write daily, and Oscar Wilde was a frequent visitor to the café before him.The present manager, Catherine Mathivat, is Boulat’s great-great-granddaughter, and journalists still frequent these cafés in the mornings.

This is a sketch of what the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey looked like at its prime, before the French Revolution.

All that is left of Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey Church is the original chapel from the sixth century and the church with the bell tower. Formerly one of the richest Abbey’s in France, Saint-Germain-des-Prés held one of the largest libraries, and in the 12th century provided parchment for the monks and the University. At one point, the Abbey contained a boarding school, one of its students being Victor Hugo. This is also the final resting place of the French philosopher, René Descartes.

As we made our way through the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter, which gets its name from the Latin language, which was widely spoken in and around the University during the Middle Ages, our guide pointed out several literary historical spots.

When Hemingway originally came to Paris, Gertrude Stein set up him and his wife in Hotel D’Angleterre, in room 14, on their first night in Paris. This is where he began writing A Moveable Feast. The family later moved closer to the French Pantheon, but Hemingway was a recurring visitor, as sometimes he was either too drunk to get home or rented a room to bed another woman.

Restaurant Le Comptoir des Saints Prés, known as Michaud’s in his book, was considered expensive to Hemingway and where he went for a treat. James Joyce and his wife were regularly at this restaurant.

L’Hotel, previously known as L’Hotel d’Alsace, is where Oscar Wilde spent his last days. After being kicked out of his hotel by the Louvre because he couldn’t afford it, he moved to this hotel under the name Christian Marmot. He refused to leave the hotel as he was dying and remarked, "either the wallpaper goes or I go." There is now an Oscar Wilde Suite hotel room designed after his London drawing room.

Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein were two of the leading expatriate figures during the first half of the 20th Century. Though both women were American novelists, Stein was a writer and art collector while Beach was a bookseller. Both women moved to Paris and hosted the leading figures of modernism in art and literature. Beach called these writers “tumbleweeds;” Stein called them “the lost generation.” Though both of these women worked with many of the same writers, there is no record of the two of them interacting.

In 1919, Beach opened an English language bookstore and lending library that she named Shakespeare and Company. The store attracted both American and English readers and aspiring writers to whom Beach offered her hospitality in exchange for watching the shop. Beach published James Joyce’s manuscript Ulysses, and sold Ernest Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. With the publication of these two works, her store became too small for her patrons and she moved to a larger store in 1921. During the second World War, the Germans forced her to close her shop, and when Beach refused they fined her. She was forced to close in 1941. Many of the writers she helped left her during the war and would not help her when she was ordered to close her business. During the liberation of 1944, Hemingway and other writers wanted Beech to open up again, but she never did.

In 1951, George Whitman befriended Sylvia Beach when he opened his English language bookstore, originally called Le Mistral. Beach gave Whitman permission to use her store’s name; Whitman only renamed it in 1964, on the second anniversary of Sylvia Beach’s death and the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.

Today Shakespeare and Company is a second-hand book store, antiquarian bookseller, and a free library to the public. This store, as with Sylvia’s, houses aspiring writers and artists in exchange for their helping out around the store. Since the shop opened in 1951, over 30,000 “tumbleweeds” have come through the front doors and worked for the store.

If you ever get the chance to visit Paris, and are a literature lover like me, join a tour or create your own tour and travel back into the Pairs of our literature forefathers.

~M