Paris's oldest terminus — Claude Monet's steam-filled train shed, the boat trains to the Atlantic liners, and the platform where the Paris chapters of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night end in pistol shots.
Saint-Lazare is where Parisian railways began: the city's first passenger terminus opened here in 1837, and the station grew with the century until Juste Lisch wrapped it in the great stone façade of 1889, clock at the center, for the Exposition year. The painters arrived before the novelists — Monet set up inside the shed in 1877 and painted its steam and glass a dozen times, and Caillebotte fixed the iron bridge behind it — because Saint-Lazare was the modern world's front door: Normandy, the suburbs, and, crucially, the boat trains that met the transatlantic liners at Le Havre and Cherbourg. For a generation of Americans, Paris began and ended on these platforms.
That is exactly how Tender Is the Night uses it. The novel's Paris section closes at Saint-Lazare: the Divers and the young film star Rosemary Hoyt come to see Abe North — the circle's ruined composer — off on the boat train — hungover, magnificent, already lost — amid the farewells of the American colony. And as the train pulls out, the enameled surface of the expatriate morning cracks: a woman named Maria Wallis draws a revolver and shoots her Englishman dead on the platform, and the party walks out of the station into a changed book. Fitzgerald chose his station precisely — the glamorous threshold between the Paris idyll and the Atlantic's real world, violence arriving exactly at the point of departure.
For Langston Hughes, the platform held a real farewell. In March 1924, the dancer Sonya found a contract in Le Havre, and Hughes came with her to Saint-Lazare on a rainy afternoon. She cried, waved through the carriage window as the train pulled out, and disappeared from his life; in The Big Sea, he ends the episode simply by saying that he never saw her again.
The station's own story never paused: it remains Paris's great commuter machine, second only to the Nord in traffic, its Lisch front restored and a glass canopy added to the forecourt in the 2010s renovation. The clock still presides; the boat trains are gone, but the platforms still perform a dozen small departures a minute for anyone collecting material.
The first passenger terminus in Paris opens — the railway age arrives at the Quartier de l'Europe.
Monet paints the train shed from inside — steam, glass, and iron, a dozen canvases.
Juste Lisch's façade and clock complete the station for the Exposition.
The boat trains: Le Havre and Cherbourg for the liners — the American colony's revolving door.
Langston Hughes sees Sonya off for Le Havre on a rainy afternoon; he never sees her again.
Fitzgerald ends the Paris chapters of Tender Is the Night on the platform — a farewell, a revolver, and the idyll over.
The commuter machine runs on — Lisch's front restored, new glass on the forecourt.
Setting of the story
The boat-train farewell that closes the novel's Paris idyll: Abe North departing in ruins, and Maria Wallis's revolver shots on the platform as the train pulls out — violence timed exactly to the point of departure.
Recalled in the memoir
Hughes recalls saying goodbye to Sonya here on a rainy March afternoon in 1924 as she left for a dancing engagement in Le Havre.
Visited by
Hughes said goodbye to Sonya here on a rainy March afternoon in 1924 as she left for a dancing engagement in Le Havre.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about Gare Saint-Lazare in Tender Is the Night.
Where the stage version of Chéri premiered in 1921, and where Colette herself played Léa at its hundredth performance.
Visit the place
Where Colette made her public stage debut in 1906, the first step of the music-hall career that won her independence from Willy.
Visit the place
The office by the Opéra where American expatriates collected their mail and cashed their cheques, and where David goes to escape Giovanni's room in Baldwin's novel.
Visit the place
The boulevard music hall where Colette played the title role in La Romanichelle in 1906, during her run as a professional performer.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
