Hotel · Montmartre (Pigalle) · 9e arrondissement

Hotel Liseux and Café Liseux

Name: Hotel Liseux and Café Liseux
Address: 24 rue Pierre-Fontaine (formerly rue Fontaine), Paris, 75009, FR

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowAn unrelated restaurant and private upper floors

The hotel and café are gone. The corner building survives with an unrelated restaurant at street level; the former hotel interior is not open to visitors.

The surviving Pigalle corner where the vanished Café Liseux and Hotel Liseux stood, and where Langston Hughes lodged during his 1937 and 1938 returns to Paris.

Address: 24 rue Pierre-Fontaine (formerly rue Fontaine), 75009 Paris
Years: Hotel and café in the Black Montmartre era; Hughes stayed here in 1937 and 1938

Illustration Color present-day view of the surviving building at 24 rue Pierre-Fontaine and rue de Douai under a clear blue sky

The building today. Café Liseux and Hotel Liseux are gone, and the upper floors are private.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

This corner building stands at 24 rue Pierre-Fontaine, historically rue Fontaine, where rue de Douai meets it in the Pigalle district. Café Liseux occupied the ground floor and Hotel Liseux operated above. Both businesses are gone. A present-day visit is limited to the exterior: the street-level restaurant is unrelated, the upper floors are private, and no plaque identifies the Hughes connection.

In the 1920s and 1930s, rue Fontaine belonged to Black Montmartre's concentrated world of cafés, hotels and nightclubs. Zelli's stood farther down the street, Le Grand Duc was close by on the former rue Pigalle, and musicians used several informal cafés around the intersection. Liseux combined two useful things in one address: a place to meet at street level and rooms above it.

Langston Hughes, the American poet who became a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, returned to Paris as an established writer in 1937 and again in 1938. Paris historian Monique Y. Wells identifies Hotel Liseux as his lodging on both visits, drawing on Hughes's autobiography and Arnold Rampersad's biography. This gives the Hughes map a later chapter beyond his better-known months as a nearly penniless twenty-two-year-old dishwasher in 1924.

Wells also proposes that Hughes spent his first Paris night here in 1924 after musicians directed him to a hotel across the street. She carefully presents that identification as an inference. The Big Sea confirms the one-night hotel stay but does not name Liseux, so this page does not state the 1924 identification as fact.

The historical value of the address therefore rests on two different levels of evidence. Hughes's 1937 and 1938 stays are the supported connection. The possible 1924 stay remains a useful research lead, preserved as a hypothesis rather than converted into a certain map claim.

Key facts

Address: 24 rue Pierre-Fontaine, historically rue Fontaine, at rue de Douai
What it was: Café Liseux at street level with Hotel Liseux above
Langston Hughes: Stayed here during his Paris visits in 1937 and 1938
1924: A possible first-night lodging, but only an inference and not stated as established fact
Today: The building survives; the café and hotel are gone
Visiting: Exterior view only; unrelated business below and private upper floors

In images

Black-and-white present-day view of the surviving corner building at 24 rue Pierre-Fontaine and rue de Douai — The same surviving corner in black and white.Editorial illustration

Color present-day view of the surviving building at 24 rue Pierre-Fontaine and rue de Douai under a clear blue sky — The building today. Café Liseux and Hotel Liseux are gone, and the upper floors are private.Editorial illustration

Black-and-white reconstruction of Café Liseux and Hotel Liseux at 24 rue Fontaine in 1937 — The same evidence-conscious 1937 reconstruction in black and white.Artistic reconstruction

Color reconstruction of the modest Café Liseux with Hotel Liseux above it in 1937, with period pedestrians and traffic — Evidence-conscious reconstruction of the café and hotel in 1937. The exact historical shopfront is not documented.Artistic reconstruction

Timeline

1924
Hughes takes an unnamed room for his first Paris night; its identification as Liseux remains inferred.
1937
Hughes returns to Paris and stays at Hotel Liseux as a successful writer.
1938
Hughes again lodges at Hotel Liseux during a Paris return.
Today
The corner building remains, but neither Café Liseux nor Hotel Liseux survives.

On the map

Writers who knew this place

Langston Hughes

American · American poet at the center of the Harlem Renaissance. He spent most of 1924 in Montmartre, washing dishes at the Grand Duc nightclub, and told the story in his memoir The Big Sea.

Lived here · 1937–1938

Monique Y. Wells identifies the hotel above Café Liseux at 24 rue Fontaine as Hughes's lodging on his returns to Paris in 1937 and 1938. Her possible identification of Hughes's unnamed first-night hotel in 1924 is kept out of this claim.

— Monique Y. Wells, Stepping Back in Time: Langston Hughes' writings reveal Black Montmartre (2003)

Within walking distance

Nightclub · Montmartre (Pigalle)

Zelli's

Crowded, smoky, and loud — Joe Zelli's Montmartre boîte, where the music hits you at the door and the novel's Paris nights go to end.

Visit the place

The same corner at 52 rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle in color, cream facade under a blue sky, red shutter tagged with graffiti

Nightclub · Montmartre (Pigalle)

Le Grand Duc

The tiny Montmartre nightclub where Langston Hughes washed dishes in 1924 and Bricktop began her Paris career — an eight-foot bar, a dance floor for a dozen couples, and the after-hours jam sessions that ended the quarter's nights.

Visit the place

Colour drawing of the boulevard de Clichy at night, neon signs for sex shops and peep shows along the frontages with the Moulin Rouge windmill beyond

Quarter · Pigalle

Pigalle

The strip along the boulevard de Clichy below Montmartre, where the studios and the cabarets shared a pavement until only the second kind was left.

Visit the place

Present-day color view of the corner of rue La Bruyère and rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, with cream façades and burgundy awnings beneath a blue sky

Café · Montmartre (Pigalle)

The Flea Pit

The vanished café at the La Bruyère and Pigalle corner where Black musicians and performers gathered, and where Langston Hughes watched Sonya hide beneath their table.

Visit the place

The 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.