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.
This is where the book begins: a two-room flat up four flights of stairs, with no hot water, a squat toilet on the landing, and a bal-musette — a working-class accordion dance hall — grinding away on the ground floor. Ernest and Hadley Hemingway moved in during January 1922, weeks after arriving in Paris, on the advice of Sherwood Anderson that the Left Bank was where a writer could live on nothing. The rent was within even their means, and the opening pages of A Moveable Feast inventory the street's smells, the drunks, and the cold with the tenderness people reserve for the first home of a marriage.
The flat was for living; the writing happened around the corner, in a room Hemingway rented at the top of a hotel on the rue Descartes — the same hotel where Verlaine had died. The neighborhood supplied his education in the meantime: the Place de la Contrescarpe up the street, the market on the rue Mouffetard below it, and at number 71 next door, the flat where Valery Larbaud had put up James Joyce while he finished Ulysses. One short block of the rue du Cardinal Lemoine held both the beginning of Hemingway's Paris and the end of Joyce's novel.
The Hemingways left in August 1923 for Toronto and the birth of their son, and took a different flat on their return. But the memoir fixed this address as the origin point of the whole legend — the place where 'we were very poor and very happy.' The building still stands, privately lived-in, with a plaque beside the blue door that misquotes nothing.
'Shakespeare and Company' — Hadley, asked what there is for lunch
“Little radishes, and good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart.”
Hadley Richardson answers when her husband comes home and asks what there is. He has walked back from Sylvia Beach's shop with an armful of books she lent him without the deposit he could not pay.
From A Moveable FeastNext door at No. 71, Joyce finishes Ulysses in Valery Larbaud's borrowed flat.
The Hemingways move in during January; Ernest rents a writing room around the corner on the rue Descartes.
The apprenticeship year — cafés, Stein's salon, the first Paris sketches.
The couple leaves for Toronto in August for the birth of their son, Bumby.
Hemingway's A Moveable Feast opens at this address and makes it a pilgrimage site.
The building stands unchanged; the plaque draws a steady line of readers up the hill.
Recalled in the memoir
Hemingway and Hadley's first Paris apartment, on the fifth floor with no running water. He describes it in the opening pages of the book.
Lived here · 1922–1923
Ernest and Hadley Hemingway's first Paris apartment — the fifth-floor walk-up described in the opening pages of A Moveable Feast.
Literary generation · c. 1921–1929
The writers remade by war and expatriate Paris — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Pound, and the rooms, presses, and bookshops that turned their encounters into literature.
Enter the movement
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.
Visit the place
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.
Visit the place
A working-class accordion dance hall in the Latin Quarter — the neighborhood danced there most nights, and the expatriate crowd borrowed it on Mondays.
Visit the place
The street between the Luxembourg gardens and the Panthéon where the narrator of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises stops for coffee and a brioche, on the one morning the novel shows him going to work. He never names the café.
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.
