Gare d'Orsay

The place, briefly

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.