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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
IllustrationColour photorealistic exterior view of the Cafe de la Mairie beneath a bright blue sky

The same corner cafe in bright present-day colour, facing Saint-Sulpice.

Editorial illustration

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

In images

The working cafe on place Saint-Sulpice that belongs to the Paris geography of Nightwood.Editorial illustration
The same corner cafe in bright present-day colour, facing Saint-Sulpice.Editorial illustration
Inside the compact Paris cafe dining room, interpreted with a new set of customers.Editorial illustration
Looking from the cafe toward the church and the activity of place Saint-Sulpice.Editorial illustration
The corner terrace, shown with generated visitors rather than identifiable real patrons.Editorial illustration
The cafe bar and its everyday fittings in a bright present-day interpretation.Editorial illustration
An evening interior that evokes the nocturnal Saint-Sulpice atmosphere of Nightwood without depicting a specific scene.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 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

Cover of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

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

Illustrated portrait of Ralph Ellison

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)

Illustrated portrait of Djuna Barnes

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.

Within walking distance

Place Saint-Sulpice in summer light, the fountain in the foreground and the church façade beyond the plane trees

Square · Saint-Germain-des-Prés / Odéon

Place Saint-Sulpice

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
Present-day color view of Hôtel Madison and Saint-Germain-des-Prés church beneath a blue sky

Hotel · Saint-Germain-des-Prés, facing the church

Hôtel Madison

The hotel facing the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés where Albert Camus lived from June 1940 — putting him, from the month Paris fell, at the centre of the quarter that would define postwar French intellectual life.

Visit the place
Brasserie Lipp today, red awning lit at dusk with the neon LIPP sign above the door

Restaurant · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Brasserie Lipp

Beer, potato salad, and choucroute after a day's work. Ernest Hemingway considered it one of the best places in Paris.

Visit the place
Bright present-day view of cyclists and pedestrians at Place Sartre-Beauvoir

Square · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Place Jean-Paul-Sartre-et-Simone-de-Beauvoir

A small square in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, renamed in 2000 for Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir together — a few steps from the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, where they worked.

Visit the place
References

References

The sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document Café de la Mairie, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.

  1. 1A Walk Around the Left Bank

    Periodical
    The Paris Review
    Used for

    Contemporary reporting or criticism used to document the historical reception and context of Café de la Mairie.

    View source

  2. 2Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, edited by Cheryl J. Plumb — edition note

    Website
    Dalkey Archive Press
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Café de la Mairie page.

    View source

  1. 3About Djuna Barnes — Djuna Barnes in Special Collections

    Archive
    University of Maryland Libraries
    Used for

    Archival evidence used to document the historical record connected to Café de la Mairie.

    View source

  2. 4Peggy's Friends: Djuna Barnes

    Website
    Peggy Guggenheim Collection
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Café de la Mairie page.

    View source
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Why these sources are here

These references provide the documented foundation for this page's history and context. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.

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