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.
Le Fiacre ran as a discreet queer house through a decade when a prefectural order forbade men to dance together in public, and when a camera inside a crowded gay bar put the owner's licence and the customers' names at risk. Virtually no photograph of the interior survives. What the written record preserves instead is how the place was laid out and how it worked.
The house is gone, but its tenth year is preserved at the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris.
The history of 4 rue du Cherche-Midi holds a literary crossover that connects the two most important queer rooms of Baldwin's Paris. In an interview, the American poet John Ashbery recounted the night in the 1950s when he met his long-time partner Pierre Martory at Le Fiacre. Ashbery said that because the bar was getting too crowded to talk, the pair left and walked over to the nearby La Reine Blanche to continue the evening, joining up the two addresses that carry most of this history between them.
The Baldwin connection runs through the proprietor rather than the room. The New York Times account of his Paris has him meeting the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger at La Reine Blanche, and the two of them going on to drink at this house, the nearby and slightly more glamorous nightclub — whose owner, it says, became the basis for the character of Guillaume in Giovanni's Room. Guillaume's bar in the novel is invented: Baldwin gives it no name and no address, and no scene in the book happens at 4 rue du Cherche-Midi. Baldwin never confirmed the identification in any letter or interview in the public record.
What makes Le Fiacre the more interesting of the two candidates is that the novel's geography matches this house and not a single-room bar. Guillaume's bar has an upstairs. Giovanni describes being humiliated by Guillaume "right downstairs in the bar", in front of a room that had filled up on purpose, which means the two of them had been somewhere else, above it. At the end of the book Guillaume is found dead in the private quarters over his own bar, strangled with the sash of his dressing gown. A room below where men drank and rooms above where the proprietor conducted his business in private is precisely the arrangement that let Le Fiacre operate for a decade. In the novel the same arrangement is what makes Guillaume dangerous: the floor upstairs is where his power over Giovanni is exercised, and where it kills him.
When it closed is not recorded. Accounts put it variously in the early 1960s and the 1970s, and the sources they cite for those dates do not give them; the French record describes Le Fiacre as still running in the 1960s and stops there. A bar of this kind does not generate a closing notice, which is part of the same problem as the missing photographs.
There is nothing to see now. The address returned to ordinary use, and no plaque records any of it. Saint-Germain-des-Prés keeps its literary memorials for the Flore and Les Deux Magots, a few streets north. By the 1990s the centre of homosexual Paris had moved out of the quarter entirely, first to the rue Sainte-Anne, then to Les Halles, and finally to Le Marais, where it still is today.
Charles Trenet performs here in duet with Johnny Hess; the house is run by the cabaret performer O'dett.
Le Fiacre opens in the form it became known for — dated by the "10 ANS" porcelain struck for its tenth year.
Louis "Loulou" Baruc takes it over and splits it in two: restaurant above, gay bar below.
Christopher Isherwood is among the international clientele.
Giovanni's Room is published. Guillaume's bar, invented and unnamed, is later said to draw on Le Fiacre and La Reine Blanche.
A porcelain vide-poche marks ten years, stamped with the address and the telephone number LIT.09-79. The Musée Carnavalet acquired it in 2018.
A model for the book's version
Le Fiacre's owner became the basis for the character of Guillaume. Loulou Baruc ran a bar below and his own business in the rooms above — the arrangement the novel gives Guillaume, and the one he dies in.
Frequented by
Le Fiacre is named, with La Reine Blanche, among the bars Baldwin drank in during his Paris years and among the models for Guillaume's bar in Giovanni's Room. The novel's bar is invented and unnamed, so the identification cannot be checked against the text; what can be said is that Le Fiacre's two-floor arrangement — a gay bar at street level, private rooms above — matches the bar Baldwin wrote, where Guillaume humiliates Giovanni downstairs and is later found dead in his quarters upstairs.
Baruc took over Le Fiacre in the 1950s and ran it on two floors: a twelve-table restaurant with a forty-franc menu on the premier étage, and a packed gay bar on the ground floor. He had trained at Maxim's and at Fouquet's.
Beer, potato salad, and choucroute after a day's work. Ernest Hemingway considered it one of the best places in Paris.
Visit the place
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.
Visit the place
The quiet square between Saint-Germain and the Luxembourg — the fountain, the pigeons, the towered church, and a stillness three generations of writers noticed.
Visit the place
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.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
