Places
The real addresses where the work was made — every café, studio, bookshop, and dance hall researched, illustrated, and mapped, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Montparnasse
La Closerie des Lilas
Ernest Hemingway's favorite writing spot, where he drafted much of The Sun Also Rises. Quieter than the other cafés, which was the point.
Le Dôme
The noisy common room of Montparnasse and the setting of 'With Pascin at the Dôme' — the café for watching the show, not for working.
The Dingo Bar
The American bar where Ernest Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald in late April 1925 — two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published.
Le Select
The all-night café of the Vavin crossroads and the closest thing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises has to a home address — the crowd always ends up at the Select.
La Rotonde
The café every taxi driver delivered Americans to — the novel's driest Montparnasse joke, and before that the painters' living room, where the patron took drawings for drinks.
Black Manikin Press (4 Rue Delambre)
Edward Titus's Montparnasse bookshop and small press, where D. H. Lawrence settled terms on 5 April 1929 for the cheap Paris edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover that finally undercut the pirates.
Grand Hôtel de Versailles (60 Boulevard du Montparnasse)
The Montparnasse hotel where D. H. Lawrence lived from 12 March to 7 April 1929 while he looked for a publisher willing to print Lady Chatterley's Lover cheaply enough to undercut the pirates. It is the only address in Paris that carries a plaque to him.
Montparnasse
The quarter that took the painters from Montmartre around 1910 and the American writers a decade later, built around four cafés on one crossroads.
La Coupole
The giant brasserie of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, opened in December 1927 with a party the quarter never forgot — Blaise Cendrars was in the opening-night crowd.
23 Rue Jean-Dolent
The Paris apartment where Blaise Cendrars and Raymone Duchâteau settled in 1950 after their marriage — his home for almost nine years, facing the rear wall of La Santé prison.
Notre-Dame-des-Champs
27 Rue de Fleurus
Gertrude Stein's apartment and salon — the drawing room of modernism, where Ernest Hemingway was instructed, encouraged, and eventually indicted as part of a lost generation.
113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
Ernest Hemingway's second flat, above a working sawmill — where the journalism stopped, The Sun Also Rises was finished, and the first marriage ended.
70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
Ezra Pound's courtyard studio — the workshop of modernism's impresario during his Paris years, a few doors down the street from Ernest Hemingway's later flat above the sawmill.
Latin Quarter
74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine
Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson's first Paris apartment, on the fifth floor with no running water. He describes it in the opening pages of the book.
Bal Musette
A working-class accordion dance hall in the Latin Quarter — the neighborhood danced there most nights, and the expatriate crowd borrowed it on Mondays.
Place de la Contrescarpe
The small square at the top of the rue Mouffetard, a minute from Ernest Hemingway's first flat — now one of the quarter's prettiest corners. The novel visits it after dark.
Bal Bullier
The students' dance hall behind the mock-oriental façade opposite the Closerie des Lilas — where the Latin Quarter danced for a century, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay painted the dancers.
Chez Émile
An Alsatian restaurant with an upper room at the quiet end of the Boul' Mich' — where Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Sisley Huddleston talked for hours, and only the memoir remembers it.
Shakespeare and Company (Rue de la Bûcherie)
George Whitman's bookshop by the Seine — opened as Le Mistral in 1951, renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964 with Sylvia Beach's blessing, and still sleeping writers among its shelves.
The Latin Quarter
The university quarter on the hill above the river, named for the language its students once spoke, and the address of Ernest Hemingway's first Paris flat.
6 rue du Pot de Fer (Hotel des Bons Amis)
The cheap Latin Quarter lodging house where Eric Blair lived for eighteen months before he was George Orwell, and the raw material for the Paris half of Down and Out in Paris and London.
Odéon
Shakespeare and Company (12 Rue de l'Odéon)
Sylvia Beach's original bookshop and lending library — Ernest Hemingway's home away from home, and where James Joyce's Ulysses was first published. The shop closed in 1941; the current Shakespeare and Company is a successor at a different address.
Jardin du Luxembourg
Ernest Hemingway's daily shortcut and his hungry-day refuge — the park where he walked to avoid the smell of food, and studied the Cézannes in its museum on an empty stomach.
Shakespeare and Company (8 Rue Dupuytren)
Where Shakespeare and Company began: the tiny shop Sylvia Beach opened on 19 November 1919, two years before the move to the rue de l'Odéon.
La Maison des Amis des Livres
Adrienne Monnier's bookshop and lending library — the French half of the rue de l'Odéon, where Ulysses was read aloud to Paris before it was a book.
58 Rue de Vaugirard
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's Left Bank apartment in the summer of 1928, facing the Luxembourg Gardens — the address of Zelda's ballet discipline and Scott's stalled novel.
Le Tournon
The café below the Senate that served as the unofficial headquarters of Black American writers in postwar Paris, with Richard Wright at the center and James Baldwin among the regulars.
14 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince
Richard Wright's Paris address for eleven years — the apartment where he wrote the books of his exile, marked since 1992 by a marble plaque.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Brasserie Lipp
Beer, potato salad, and choucroute after a day's work. Ernest Hemingway considered it one of the best places in Paris.
Les Deux Magots
The famous literary terrace where the expat crowd gathered. Ernest Hemingway came here, though he preferred La Closerie for actual work.
Café de Flore
A few doors from Les Deux Magots and part of the same Left Bank circuit. Later became more associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Michaud's
The smart restaurant of the quarter — where the hungry Hemingways watched the Joyce family dine, and where F. Scott Fitzgerald asked the question answered in 'A Matter of Measurements.'
Place Saint-Sulpice
The quiet square between Saint-Germain and the Luxembourg — the fountain, the pigeons, the towered church, and a stillness three generations of writers noticed.
Rue Bonaparte
The street that stitches the Left Bank together — river to Beaux-Arts to Saint-Germain to Saint-Sulpice — and the nightly walk Henry Miller could not stop remembering.
28 rue Jacob
Colette's first marital home in Paris, a third-floor apartment she took with her husband Willy in 1893.
Hôtel Verneuil
The Left Bank hotel where James Baldwin settled after arriving in Paris in November 1948, and where his first published essays were written.
Le Montana
A Saint-Germain bar of the postwar years, steps from the Café de Flore, that the City of Paris counts among the gay clubs James Baldwin frequented.
26 rue Saint-Benoît
The Saint-Germain address where the City of Paris places James Baldwin as a likely resident in the early 1950s, around the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Black Sun Press (19 Rue de Lille)
The Paris town house of Harry and Caresse Crosby, and the address of the Black Sun Press, which published D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Hemingway and Hart Crane in editions made to be beautiful rather than to sell.
Le Fiacre (4 rue du Cherche-Midi)
The restaurant-above, bar-below house on the rue du Cherche-Midi that became the centre of gay Paris in the 1950s, and one of two bars named as models for Guillaume's bar in Giovanni's Room.
La Reine Blanche
The cheap bar across the boulevard from the Café de Flore where James Baldwin drank through his first Paris years, and where he met Lucien Happersberger in 1949.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés
The Left Bank quarter around the abbey church, where the cafés doubled as offices and the bars above and below them ran the other half of post-war Paris.
20 rue Jacob
The courtyard pavilion where Natalie Clifford Barney held her Friday salon for sixty years, and the small Doric temple in its garden.
3 Rue des Grands-Augustins
Robert and Sonia Delaunay's apartment and studio from 1910 to 1935 — where La Prose du Transsibérien took its colors, and whose key Blaise Cendrars held while the couple waited out the First World War abroad.
4 Rue de Savoie
The attic room where Blaise Cendrars settled in 1912, back from New York — his home, the address of the one-man publishing house that issued La Prose du Transsibérien, and the room he came back to after losing his arm in the war.
Île Saint-Louis
Île de la Cité
Notre-Dame de Paris
The cathedral seen at night from the wooden footbridge off the Quai de Béthune — the still point of the finest walk in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, answered a decade later from the same river in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
Daniel Halévy's Salon (39 Quai de l'Horloge)
Daniel Halévy's literary salon on the Île de la Cité, where D. H. Lawrence went to a tea in March 1929 and met François Mauriac. It produced the only line about Paris that anyone quotes him on.
Faubourg Saint-Germain
Place de la Concorde
Grands Boulevards
Montmartre
Zelli's
Crowded, smoky, and loud — Joe Zelli's Montmartre boîte, where the music hits you at the door and the novel's Paris nights go to end.
4 Rue Girardon
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Montmartre apartment during the Occupation — where Gen Paul came up from his studio a few doors away, and where the manuscripts later famous as 'the lost trove' were left behind in June 1944.
98 Rue Lepic
The Montmartre flat Louis-Ferdinand Céline kept for twelve years, and the desk behind both of his novels — Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan were written at this address.
Le Grand Duc
The tiny Montmartre nightclub where Langston Hughes washed dishes in 1924 and Bricktop began her Paris career — an eight-foot bar, a dance floor for a dozen couples, and the after-hours jam sessions that ended the quarter's nights.
Rue des Trois Frères
A freely walkable nineteenth-century Montmartre street of slopes, cobbles and apartment façades, and the deliberately imprecise location of Langston Hughes's second Paris attic in 1924.
Place du Tertre
Montmartre's historic hilltop square, now shared by restaurant terraces and licensed artists—and the setting of Langston Hughes and Anne Marie Coussey's last Paris dinner together in 1924.
The Flea Pit
The vanished café at the La Bruyère and Pigalle corner where Black musicians and performers gathered, and where Langston Hughes watched Sonya hide beneath their table.
Hotel Liseux and Café Liseux
The surviving Pigalle corner where the vanished Café Liseux and Hotel Liseux stood, and where Langston Hughes lodged during his 1937 and 1938 returns to Paris.
Le Chat Noir
The legendary Montmartre cabaret where poets, singers, painters, cartoonists and musicians made the room itself an artistic creation — crowned by an extraordinary shadow theater.
Alt Empordà, Catalonia
Cadaqués
A white coastal town in northeastern Catalonia where a medieval centre, a sheltered bay, Portlligat, and the rocks of Cap de Creus meet the documented lives and work of Salvador Dalí and his circle.
Figueres
A practical guide to Figueres, the inland Catalan city where Salvador Dalí was born and buried, with a walkable centre, two rail stations, the Dalí Theatre-Museum, and the vast Sant Ferran fortress.
Auteuil
Bas-Meudon, on the Seine below the hill
Batignolles
Beaubourg
Central Paris
Chaillot
2 rue Georges-Ville
The home of Mathilde de Morny — Missy — where Colette lived through much of their relationship after leaving Willy.
44 rue de Villejust
The ground-floor apartment Colette rented on her own after leaving Willy, remembered as a place of new independence. The building no longer exists.
Champ de Mars
The Salon on the Avenue Charles Floquet
The drawing room by the Champ de Mars where Ezra Pound the composer made his debut — the Villon songs, heard by invitation before anyone believed he'd really done it.
2 Square de Robiac
James Joyce's longest Paris address — the family flat in a quiet cul-de-sac off the rue de Grenelle, with the cool quiet study where Work in Progress cost twelve hundred hours a chapter.
Eiffel Tower
The tower at the era's edge of vision — and in the twenties and thirties, a champagne advertisement three hundred meters tall, fizzing in lights over everyone's night walks.
Champs-Élysées
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
The concrete temple of the avant-garde — where The Rite of Spring caused a riot in 1913, and the Ballet Mécanique caused another in 1926, with Ezra Pound shouting over the pianolas.
Théâtre Marigny
The theatre in the Champs-Élysées gardens where Colette played Paniska in Pan in 1906.
Le Bœuf sur le Toit
The bar-cabaret Louis Moysès opened in 1922, named for the Cocteau–Milhaud ballet — headquarters of the postwar avant-garde around Jean Cocteau, and one of Blaise Cendrars's regular Paris stops.
Clichy
Clichy — Montmartre's edge
Ermenonville, Oise
Faubourg Saint-Denis
Giverny
La Muette
Latin Quarter, between the Luxembourg and the Panthéon
Le Marais
Le Village Anglais, Suresnes
Les Halles
Boulevard de Sébastopol
The Haussmann boulevard running north from Châtelet, where David and Giovanni hail the cab that takes them to the room the novel is named for.
Les Halles
The wholesale food market that fed Paris for eight centuries, and where David and Giovanni eat oysters at sunrise on the morning after they meet.
Au Pied de Cochon
The brasserie opened in 1947 to feed the porters of the old Les Halles food market, and the last place still serving at the address where they ate.
Louveciennes
Louvre
Pont du Carrousel
The crossing from the Louvre to the rue des Saints-Pères: an 1834 iron bridge replaced by a stone one in 1939, with distinctive telescoping streetlamps designed to rise after dark.
Musée du Louvre
The Louvre is open 9 a.m.–6 p.m. Monday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 9 a.m.–9 p.m. Wednesday and Friday; it is closed Tuesday. Reserve a timed ticket, choose a short route before arriving, and check the live room schedule on the day of your visit.
Madeleine
Théâtre des Mathurins
Where Colette made her public stage debut in 1906, the first step of the music-hall career that won her independence from Willy.
Théâtre Michel
Where the stage version of Chéri premiered in 1921, and where Colette herself played Léa at its hundredth performance.
6 rue de Miromesnil
The beauty shop Colette opened in 1932, selling cosmetics she made herself — her attempt to turn her fame into a business.
Madeleine–Élysée
Meudon, above the Seine
Ménilmontant
Nation
Navarre, below the Roncesvalles pass
Oberkampf
Off the Plaza Mayor
Old Town, Key West
Opéra
L'Olympia
The boulevard music hall where Colette played the title role in La Romanichelle in 1906, during her run as a professional performer.
American Express Office at Opéra
The office by the Opéra where American expatriates collected their mail and cashed their cheques, and where David goes to escape Giovanni's room in Baldwin's novel.
Palais-Royal
9 rue de Beaujolais
Colette's home above the Palais-Royal garden, and the address that made her its dame. She lived here from 1938 until her death in 1954.
Jardin du Palais-Royal
The colonnaded garden Colette watched from her Palais-Royal windows for the last years of her life, and the setting of her 1954 state funeral.
Le Grand Véfour
The Palais-Royal restaurant Colette favored in her last years, a few doors from her apartment. A brass plaque still marks her seat.
Café Royale near the Louvre
The probable site of the café where Langston Hughes lunched with collector Albert C. Barnes in 1924 — and an open brasserie a visitor can enter today.
Parc de Montsouris
Passages couverts
Passage Choiseul
The covered arcade where Louis-Ferdinand Céline grew up over his mother's lace shop — reborn in his novel Death on the Installment Plan as the Passage des Bérésinas, the gaslit 'gas jar' of its narrator Ferdinand's childhood.
École du Square Louvois
The municipal school Louis-Ferdinand Céline attended from 1900 to 1905, two minutes' walk from the family shop in the Passage Choiseul — the first classroom of the boy then registered as Louis-Ferdinand Destouches.
Passy
Pigalle
Moulin Rouge
Where Colette's 1907 mime with her lover Mathilde de Morny set off a riot and was banned by the police — her most notorious Paris performance.
Pigalle
The strip along the boulevard de Clichy below Montmartre, where the studios and the cabarets shared a pavement until only the second kind was left.
Place Vendôme
Hôtel Ritz
César Ritz's palace on the Place Vendôme — the fixed point of Right Bank luxury, where F. Scott Fitzgerald's bar legend, Tender Is the Night's longest bender, and Ernest Hemingway's two best Ritz stories all check in.
Bar Hemingway
A 25-seat cocktail bar at the rue Cambon end of the Ritz Paris, opened under Ernest Hemingway's name in 1994 in the former Le Petit Bar.
Place de l'Alma
Place des Fêtes
Plaine Monceau
177 bis rue de Courcelles
The larger apartment of the Claudine years, where Colette kept a gymnasium and her marriage to Willy came apart.
93 rue de Courcelles
The sixth-floor former studio near Parc Monceau where Colette and Willy lived while the Claudine novels appeared under his name.
Plaisance
Plaza del Castillo, in the old town
Quai Saint-Michel
Quartier de l'Europe
Tuileries
Jardin des Tuileries
André Le Nôtre's great axis between the Louvre and the Concorde — the garden every walker in these pages crossed sooner or later, palace or no palace.
Orangerie des Tuileries
The 1852 orangery of the Tuileries garden, converted to Monet's specifications and opened in 1927 as the museum of the Water Lilies.
Vieux-Port
Vivienne
École Militaire
Étoile
The Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.