The Beaux-Arts terminus on the Seine where Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton, in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, board the morning train south toward Spain — today the Musée d'Orsay.
Victor Laloux built the Gare d'Orsay for the Exposition Universelle of 1900: a railway station disguised as a palace, facing the Tuileries across the river, and the first great urban terminus designed for electric traction — no smoke, so the trains could run under a decorated stone nave in the middle of the government quarter. It was the Paris gateway of the Orléans company's lines, which meant the southwest: the Loire, Bordeaux, and the Spanish frontier all began under its seven glass-and-coffered vaults.
That geography is why the biggest scene change in The Sun Also Rises happens here. When Paris ends and Spain begins, Jake Barnes — the novel's narrator — and his fishing companion Bill Gorton take the morning train from the Gare d'Orsay — breakfast in the dining car, the country beautiful from the start, a half-hour stop at Bordeaux, the pine country of the Landes at sunset, and Bayonne by nine at night. The station is on the page for one sentence, but it is the hinge the whole book turns on: everything before it is café, everything after it is fiesta.
The station's own second act is famous. By 1939 its platforms were too short for modern trains and main-line service ended; the building lingered as a mailing center, received returning prisoners and deportees in 1945, served Orson Welles as the set of The Trial in 1962, and escaped demolition by a margin that still embarrasses Paris. In 1986 it reopened as the Musée d'Orsay, and the hall Bill and Jake hurried through now holds the Impressionists under the same gilded coffers.
Bill and I took the morning train from the Gare d’Orsay. It was a lovely day, not too hot, and the country was beautiful from the start.
Opens for the Exposition — the first electrified grand terminus, a station built like a palace.
Hemingway sends The Sun Also Rises off to Bayonne from its platforms.
Main-line trains withdrawn; the great hall goes quiet.
Receives returning prisoners and deportees at the war's end.
Orson Welles films The Trial in the abandoned station.
Reopens as the Musée d'Orsay.
On display here
The 1917 plaster reconstruction is displayed inside the Musée d'Orsay, the museum that opened in the former Gare d'Orsay in 1986. The same site had been intended for the decorative-arts museum whose doorway Rodin was commissioned to make in 1880.
On display here
The painting was assigned to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. The museum occupies the former Gare d'Orsay; collection membership does not guarantee current gallery display.
On display here
The painting was assigned to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. The museum occupies the former Gare d'Orsay; collection membership does not guarantee current gallery display.
On display here
The painting was assigned to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. The museum occupies the former Gare d'Orsay; collection membership does not guarantee current gallery display.
On display here
Bought by the French State at the Salon of 1897 for the Musée du Luxembourg, and assigned to the Louvre's paintings department for the Musée d'Orsay collections by an order of 24 July 1981 (RF 1980 173). The museum occupies the former Gare d'Orsay; its record lists the painting as not currently exhibited in September 2026.
Setting of the story
The morning train south leaves from here — Bill and Jake ride it to the Spanish border, and the novel leaves Paris behind. The station is now the Musée d'Orsay.
Ernest Hemingway wrote about Gare d'Orsay in The Sun Also Rises.
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 Paris office of The Little Review, the magazine that serialised Ulysses and published Djuna Barnes — a publication link rather than a place she is known to have worked in.
Visit the place
The houseboat Anaïs Nin rented from the actor Michel Simon on 28 February 1938, moored on the quai des Tuileries near the Pont Royal. She kept it until August, when boats were ordered out of the city and it had to be towed to Neuilly. Photographs of her aboard survive with her 1938 diary.
Visit the place
The Paris town house of Harry and Caresse Crosby, and the address of the Black Sun Press, which published D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Hemingway and Hart Crane in editions made to be beautiful rather than to sell.
Visit the place
The hotel facing the Louvre across the Seine where Camille Pissarro took a third-floor room in the spring of 1903 and painted the Pont Royal, the Pavillon de Flore and the river — the last series he made in Paris.
Visit the placeThe sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document Gare d'Orsay, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.
Primary text included as part of the documented record for Gare d'Orsay.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Gare d'Orsay page.
Map data used to verify addresses, geographic coordinates, and the placement associated with Gare d'Orsay.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Gare d'Orsay page.
These references provide the documented foundation for this page's history and context. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.
Explore more resourcesNewsletter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
