Nightclub · Latin Quarter (Panthéon) · 5e arrondissement

Bal Musette

Permanently closed

A working-class accordion dance hall in the Latin Quarter — the neighborhood danced there most nights, and the expatriate crowd borrowed it on Mondays.

Address: Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève (no number given in the novel), 75005 Paris

Artistic reconstruction The bal musette by lamplight, an accordionist playing inside the open door while couples linger on the wet cobbles

Accordion inside, cobbles outside — five nights for the quarter, one for the crowd.

Artistic reconstruction

The place, briefly

A bal musette was a working-class dance hall — an accordion, a small floor, waltzes and javas, drinks at zinc prices — and the slopes of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève had them the way other quarters had bakeries. They were not attractions; they were where the neighborhood danced. The novel is exact about the arrangement: five nights a week the hall on the rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève belonged to the working people of the Panthéon quarter, and one night a week — Monday — it became 'the dancing-club,' borrowed by a smarter crowd.

Hemingway knew the institution from the inside. His first Paris flat, around the corner at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, stood in a building that housed a bal musette on its lower floor, and the accordion came up through the boards. When he needed a room where his expatriates could collide with the real quarter — and where Lady Brett Ashley could make the entrance The Sun Also Rises is remembered for — he moved that world five minutes up the hill and let the two crowds share a floor for a night.

The bals musettes faded from the Latin Quarter by mid-century, migrating into memory along with the S bus and the horse-cabs. The street itself has kept its medieval pitch and its name, and the walk from the old Hemingway flat up to it takes the same five minutes it took in 1925.

In their words

The dancing-club was a bal musette in the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. Five nights a week the working people of the Pantheon quarter danced there. One night a week it was the dancing-club.

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Chapter 3

So the parties were transferred to a Bal Musette behind the Pantheon. It was in a working-class district, and the habitual dancers were astonished at this strange apparition of artists and writers and hangers-on.

— Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (1928) — on Ford Madox Ford's parties at a bal musette in the quarter

Key facts

What it was: A bal musette — accordion dance hall of the Panthéon quarter
Neighborhood: The Latin Quarter hillside, between the Panthéon and the river
The real model: Hemingway lived over a bal musette around the corner at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine
In the novel: The Monday dancing-club of the early Paris chapters
Today: Gone — the street remains, slope intact

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of a corner bal musette on the rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, dancers crowding the lit doorway at night — The dancing-club at night — the whole quarter funnelling through one bright door.Editorial illustration

The bal musette by lamplight, an accordionist playing inside the open door while couples linger on the wet cobbles — Accordion inside, cobbles outside — five nights for the quarter, one for the crowd.Artistic reconstruction

Timeline

1900s–1920s
Bals musettes thrive across working-class Paris; the Latin Quarter slopes keep several.
1922–1923
Hemingway lives above one at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, around the corner.
1926
Hemingway sets the dancing-club of The Sun Also Rises on the rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.
Mid-century
The accordion halls fade from the quarter.
Today
No bal on the street; the walk up from the old flat is unchanged.

On the map

Related books

Setting of the story

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 1926

A working-class accordion dance hall in the Latin Quarter — the neighborhood danced there most nights, and the expatriate crowd borrowed it on Mondays.

Depicted in its pages

Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios

Sisley Huddleston · 1928

Ford Madox Ford's parties, exiled from his studio to a bal musette behind the Panthéon — the workers astonished at the invasion of artists and writers.

Writers who knew this place

Ford Madox Ford

English · Novelist, editor, and one-man literary infrastructure — author of The Good Soldier, publisher of the young Hemingway, and host of the era's bal musette parties.

Hosted gatherings here · 1924–1925

Ford Madox Ford moves his weekly parties from his studio to a bal musette behind the Panthéon — writers and artists dancing among the quarter's regulars, per Huddleston's eyewitness account.

— Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (1928)

Ernest Hemingway

American · Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.

Ernest Hemingway wrote about Bal Musette in The Sun Also Rises.

Sisley Huddleston

British · The Times's man in Paris — the journalist who knew every table in the quarter, French and Anglo-American alike, and wrote the era down while it was happening.

Sisley Huddleston wrote about Bal Musette in Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios.

Within walking distance

The weathered green and gold Shakespeare and Company storefront today, a reader browsing at the window, the rue de la Bûcherie sign above

Bookshop · Latin Quarter

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.

Visit the place

The Seine at dusk, lamps glowing along the tree-lined quai and Notre-Dame lit above the water downstream

Landmark · 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.

Visit the place

Colour drawing of a narrow Latin Quarter street, restaurant terraces under ivy and awnings, diners at pavement tables

Quarter · Latin Quarter

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.

Visit the place

Apartment · 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.

Visit the place

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.