Setting of the story
The Sun Also Rises
The Right Bank at its grandest: Jake writes letters on the house stationery, then heads down to the bar for a Jack Rose cocktail with George the barman.
Hôtel de Crillon
Still standing
In, as a customer
Still the same
The grandest address on the Place de la Concorde — where Jake Barnes, the narrator of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, crosses the river to write letters on impressive stationery and drink a Jack Rose with George the barman.
- 10 Pl. de la Concorde, 75008 Paris
- 1909–present
Illustration
The place, briefly
The building came first and the hotel much later: Ange-Jacques Gabriel designed the colonnaded palace as one of the two matched façades framing the rue Royale on Louis XV's great square, finished in 1758 and passed to the Crillon family. It opened as a luxury hotel in 1909 and entered history ten years later, when the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference made it their headquarters — for a season in 1919, the Crillon was effectively America's address in Europe.
That is precisely the register the novel uses it in. The Crillon is the Right Bank of money and appointments, as far from the saucer-stacked terraces of Montparnasse as Paris allows. Jake Barnes turns up at five o'clock, kills time writing letters — reasoning that Crillon stationery can only help them — and goes down to the bar for a Jack Rose mixed by George, the barman fashionable memoirs of the decade mention by first name, as if everyone knew him. Then a taxi back across the Seine, barges riding high on the current, to the Select and the other life.
The Crillon has spent a century being exactly what the novel needed it to be: the fixed point of Right Bank grandeur. It closed in 2013 for a four-year restoration and reopened in 2017 under Rosewood; the Gabriel façade is protected, the bar still pours, and the stationery is presumably still worth borrowing.
In their words
At five o’clock I was in the Hotel Crillon waiting for Brett. She was not there, so I sat down and wrote some letters. They were not very good letters but I hoped their being on Crillon stationery would help them.
Key facts
- 1758 — Ange-Jacques Gabriel's façade on the Place de la Concorde
- 1909
- Headquarters of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference
- Letters on house stationery and a Jack Rose with George the barman
- Still open — restored 2013–2017, now run by Rosewood
In images
Timeline
Gabriel's palace completed on the new royal square.
Opens as the Hôtel de Crillon.
The American peace delegation takes over the house during the conference at Versailles.
Hemingway sends his narrator, Jake Barnes, to its bar for a Jack Rose in The Sun Also Rises.
Reopens after a four-year restoration.
Still the grandest address on the square.
On the map
Related books
Writers who knew this place
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway wrote about Hôtel de Crillon in The Sun Also Rises.
Within walking distance
American Library in Paris — 10 rue de l'Élysée
The surviving mansion that housed the American Library in Paris from 1920 to 1936—a center of transatlantic reading and literary life where Langston Hughes unsuccessfully asked for work.
Visit the place
Orangerie des Tuileries
The 1852 orangery of the Tuileries garden, converted to Monet's specifications and opened in 1927 as the museum of the Water Lilies.
Visit the place
Bar Hemingway
A 25-seat cocktail bar at the rue Cambon end of the Ritz Paris, opened under Ernest Hemingway's name in 1994 in the former Le Petit Bar.
Visit the place
Hôtel Ritz
César Ritz's palace on the Place Vendôme — the fixed point of Right Bank luxury, where F. Scott Fitzgerald's bar legend, Tender Is the Night's longest bender, and Ernest Hemingway's two best Ritz stories all check in.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
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.