Depicted in its pages
Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios
The upper room on the Boul' Mich' where Ford, Pierre Loving, Pound, and Huddleston played with ideas for hours — a room only this memoir remembers.
Chez Émile
Permanently closedAn Alsatian restaurant with an upper room at the quiet end of the Boul' Mich' — where Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Sisley Huddleston talked for hours, and only the memoir remembers it.
- Bd Saint-Michel, by the Bal Bullier (exact number unrecorded), 75005 Paris
Artistic reconstruction
The place, briefly
Some rooms of the era survive on plaques and awnings; Chez Émile survives on a single page. Huddleston remembers the proprietor exactly — a picturesque Alsatian restaurant keeper, perpetually dressed in white twill and a high cook's bonnet — and the upper room on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, next door to the Bal Bullier's mock-oriental façade, where the quarter's talkers went when the café terraces were too public for a real conversation.
The evening he chose to preserve is the era in miniature: Ford Madox Ford, the poet-critic Pierre Loving, Ezra Pound, and Huddleston himself in the upper room, gaily playing with ideas for hours — Pound, by the memoirist's account, the merriest spirit of the party. A hundred such evenings vanished undocumented; this one had a journalist at the table.
No directory entry, no photograph, and no plaque survives that we have found — the restaurant's afterlife is Huddleston's paragraph, which is precisely why it belongs here. Some places are preserved by their fame; this one is preserved by a witness.
In their words
What a vivacious evening we spent for example in an upper room chez Emile! Emile is a picturesque Alsatian restaurant keeper, perpetually dressed in white twill clothes, and a high cook's bonnet.
Key facts
- An Alsatian restaurant with a private upper room, next to the Bal Bullier
- Émile — white twill clothes and a high cook's bonnet, per Huddleston
- Ford, Pierre Loving, Pound, and Huddleston, playing with ideas for hours
- Gone without trace — the memoir is the only plaque
In images
Timeline
The upper room hosts the quarter's talkers, a landmark's width from the Bullier.
Huddleston preserves the room, the proprietor, and one merry evening in print.
No trace on the boulevard; the page is what remains.
On the map
Related books
Writers who knew this place
Sisley Huddleston
Frequented by
The upper room on the Boul' Mich' where he, Ford, Pierre Loving, and Pound gaily played with ideas for hours.
Within walking distance
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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.