Café · Saint-Germain-des-Prés (6th) · 6e arrondissement

Café de la Mairie

The buildingStill standing

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowStill the same

Still trading on the corner of the place Saint-Sulpice, facing the church and the fountain. An ordinary working café rather than a monument.

The café on the place Saint-Sulpice that appears in the Paris geography of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood — and which is still, unremarkably, a café.

Address: 8 place Saint-Sulpice, 75006 Paris
Years: Trading on the place Saint-Sulpice

The place, briefly

The Café de la Mairie sits on the east side of the place Saint-Sulpice, looking across at the church and the fountain. It is a plain café with a terrace, and its literary reputation is out of all proportion to its appearance.

It belongs to the Paris of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, whose characters move through this square and its surroundings. The novel's Paris is deliberately nocturnal and disreputable — a city of late rooms, churches, circuses and hotels — and Saint-Sulpice with its heavy façade and its fountain is one of its fixed points.

It is worth being precise about the nature of the connection. This is a place that appears in the book, and the honest way to record it is as a setting rather than as a café Barnes is documented to have haunted. The evidence is textual.

The café is open and functioning, and the ordinary way to visit is to sit down and order something.

Key facts

Where: The corner of the place Saint-Sulpice, facing the church
The literary connection: A setting in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
Nature of the link: Textual — a place in the novel, not a documented Barnes haunt
Access: A working café; walk in and order

Timeline

1936
Nightwood is published; the place Saint-Sulpice is part of its Paris.

On the map

Questions before you go

Is the Café de la Mairie in Nightwood?

The café and the place Saint-Sulpice belong to the novel's Paris geography. The connection is to the book rather than to a documented habit of Barnes's own.

Can you go?

Yes. It is an ordinary working café on the square, with a terrace facing the church.

Related books

Setting of the story

Nightwood

Djuna Barnes · 1936

The cafe on the place Saint-Sulpice belongs to the Paris geography of Nightwood. The link is textual - a setting in the novel rather than a documented habit of Barnes's own.

Writers who knew this place

Ralph Ellison

American · American novelist, whose Invisible Man of 1952 is one of the essential American books of the century. His Paris is deliberately brief: he came in the summer of 1954 to travel and lecture, spent a few weeks among the American expatriates, and gave The Paris Review its Art of Fiction interview at the Café de la Mairie the day before he left. Unlike Richard Wright and James Baldwin, he would not stay.

Frequented by · 1954

On the day before he left Paris in the summer of 1954, Ellison talked to the staff of The Paris Review at the Cafe de la Mairie about art and the novel. The conversation was published as The Art of Fiction No. 8 in spring 1955.

— Ralph Ellison, The Art of Fiction No. 8 (interviewed by Alfred Chester and Vilma Howard)

Djuna Barnes

American · American writer and illustrator (1892–1982). She was a New York newspaper reporter for eight years before she was a novelist, spent the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, and wrote Nightwood, the 1936 novel T. S. Eliot took to Faber and introduced.

Djuna Barnes wrote about Café de la Mairie in Nightwood.

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The Friday Letter

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