14 Rue de Tilsitt

The place, briefly

The Fitzgeralds arrived in Paris in late April 1925 with The Great Gatsby just off the presses — it had published in New York on April 10, while they were en route from the Riviera — and took a furnished fifth-floor flat at 14 rue de Tilsitt, on the quiet ring of streets that circles the Arc de Triomphe. It was a Right Bank address in every sense: a block from the Étoile, a world away from the walk-ups and working cafés where the other American writers lived. Scott was twenty-eight, briefly the most celebrated young novelist in America, and the flat matched the celebrity rather than the writing.

Nobody was ever very kind about the apartment itself, including its tenants' friends. Hemingway, who came to lunch with Hadley that first summer, remembered it as gloomy and airless, furnished with someone else's imitation antiques — the only things in it that seemed to belong to the Fitzgeralds at all were Scott's own first editions bound in pale blue leather, and the ledger in which he kept meticulous account of every story sold and every dollar earned. The ledger was the tell: the flat was rented on short-story money, and the short stories were what the parties kept interrupting.

The rue de Tilsitt year was the hinge of the Fitzgeralds' Paris. Weeks after moving in, Scott introduced himself to Hemingway at the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse, beginning the friendship that A Moveable Feast would spend three chapters settling scores with. August took the family to Antibes for a month; the winter brought them back; and in January 1926 they left for a cure at Salies-de-Béarn and then the Riviera, done with the flat for good. The Paris of these months — the Ritz, the Right Bank hotels, the parties that ended badly — is recognizably the Paris that Tender Is the Night gives to Dick and Nicole Diver.