Le Fiacre (4 rue du Cherche-Midi)

Operating at 4 rue du Cherche-Midi from about 1947, Le Fiacre was the central hub of international queer and artistic nightlife in Paris. It opened just after the war, took in the free-spirited existentialist movement then filling the Left Bank, and hit its stride through the 1950s. That decade-long golden age covers almost exactly the years James Baldwin spent living in the city and writing Giovanni's Room.[1]

It was in that window that American expatriates including Baldwin and Christopher Isherwood drank here alongside French show business. While the nearby La Reine Blanche supplied the real-life meeting behind the novel's central romance, it was Le Fiacre — and its protective two-floor layout — that gave Guillaume his character and his fictional bar its shape.[2]

The atmospheric reality

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.[3]

• The protective floor above: The house was run by Louis Baruc, a former Maxim's and Fouquet's maître d' known to his customers as Loulou. Upstairs was a sober restaurant of twelve tables with a forty-franc menu, and it drew Parisian show business — Pierre Cardin among the diners. That trade was the cover for the room below.
• The ground-floor bar: Downstairs was a tiny bar, packed to the walls. Christopher Isherwood, who came in 1956, described being "jammed in a crowd so dense you could only sway with it like seaweed in water."
• The pavement spillover: The bar was small enough that in summer the drinkers came out onto the cobbles of the rue du Cherche-Midi. In a city where the police still took an active interest in who was drinking with whom, being able to do that in the open was a considerable thing.

The surviving historical artifacts

The house is gone, but its tenth year is preserved at the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris.[4]

• The 1957 porcelain: For its tenth anniversary Le Fiacre had a small rectangular porcelain vide-poche made, twelve centimetres by eight. The Carnavalet acquired one in 2018. The face is signed "v. DERY / 57" and carries a centaur; the back reads "10 ANS / LE FIACRE / 4, Rue du Cherche-Midi / LIT.09-79". Ten years in 1957 dates this incarnation of the house to about 1947, and LIT.09-79 is its telephone number, from when Paris exchanges were still named — Littré, for the quarter.
• The guest book and the print advertising: The house kept a livre d'or, signed over the years by the writers and performers who drank there, the crime novelist Frédéric Dard among them. Its stylised print advertisements survive alongside it.

The literary crossroads and closure

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.[5]

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.[6]

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.[7]

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.[1]

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.