Restaurant · Bas-Meudon, on the Seine below the hill

La Pêche Miraculeuse

The buildingDemolished

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowNothing survives

The site is part of the modern Meudon-sur-Seine riverfront near 66–68 route de Vaugirard, now roadway, moorings and later building; business listings for the address conflict and none is identified here as the current occupant.

The riverside restaurant at Bas-Meudon, built out over the Seine — painted by Sisley and Firmin-Girard, kept by Haloppé, and remembered in A Moveable Feast for a plate of fried goujon and a view Ernest Hemingway thought belonged to a painting.

Address: 66 Route de Vaugirard, 92190 Meudon
Years: By the 1880s–1920s

Artistic reconstruction The restaurant's green-and-cream verandah in summer light, bay trees in tubs along the terrace and the restaurant's name lettered across the gable of the building behind

Lunch on the terrace in the years before the works came. The upper gallery held the tables with the river view.

Artistic reconstruction

The place, briefly

Bas-Meudon was the low, wet end of Meudon, downhill from the château and directly across the water from Billancourt. Boats had run down from Paris since the 1867 exposition, and by the end of the century the bank was a row of guinguettes: the Poisson Rouge, the Chat Noir, the Martin-Pêcheur on the place du Port. Parisians came out on the Mouches and the Hirondelles for twenty centimes, ate mussels and chips and friture de Seine at open-air tables, and went home again.

La Pêche Miraculeuse — the miraculous catch, after the Gospel story — was the exception. It traded under that sign but was known as Chez Haloppé for the man who kept it, and it was where the high society of the Third Republic ate when it came downriver: good food, and a cellar people talked about. President Félix Faure used it as the discreet end of a standing Friday arrangement, coming out to Marguerite Steinheil at the Vert Logis on the chemin des Lacets and taking his meals at the restaurant alone with her. By the 1880s it was also drawing the literary dining clubs out from Paris for the summer.

Painters had it first. Alfred Sisley put it in La Seine au Bas-Meudon in 1878, working from the hillside and looking back down at the restaurant. Marie-François Firmin-Girard went the other way and painted the terrace itself: Le dimanche au Bas-Meudon, a wide canvas of Parisians eating and drinking beside the water on a late-summer Sunday, shown at the Salon of 1884 and again at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. Commentary at the time suggested some of the diners in it were painters Firmin-Girard knew.

Which is what makes the memoir's line more than decoration. In A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway names it in 'People of the Seine' as one of the best places to eat goujon, the small dace-like fish the Seine men caught by the plateful and served fried whole, bones and all. He remembers going when there was money for a trip out of the quarter, and remembers the wine as a splendid white that was a sort of Muscadet — his own hedge, worth keeping. The place struck him as one out of a Maupassant story, with the river laid out as Sisley had painted it. He was describing a view that had in fact been painted, from more or less where he was sitting.

The quarter did not survive Louis Renault. The works at Billancourt across the river needed room, and through the first half of the century the industry took the bank the guinguettes stood on. A press photograph of 1921 still shows the Hôtel de la Pêche Miraculeuse standing beside the Restaurant de la Grotte, so it was there at the start of Hemingway's Paris years. When it went is not recorded in the sources consulted here. What is left is the postcard trade, two paintings, and a paragraph.

Served here

The dishes the books ate at this table — quoted verbatim from the text.

A heaped plate of small whole fried river fish with lemon halves and wedges, a bread basket and a carafe of white wine on a checked cloth, an open-air restaurant built out over the river behind.

'People of the Seine' — the fishermen's catch, and where to eat it

Fried goujon at Bas Meudon

They always caught some fish, and often they made excellent catches of the dace-like fish that were called goujon. They were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful. They were plump and sweet-fleshed with a finer flavor than fresh sardines even, and were not at all oily, and we ate them bones and all.

Goujon is the gudgeon, a small bottom-feeding river fish the Seine men caught from the quais with long cane poles. The best of them were eaten downriver at Bas-Meudon, at an open-air restaurant built out over the water.

From A Moveable Feast

Key facts

What it was: An open-air riverside restaurant built out over the Seine, trading as La Pêche Miraculeuse and known as Chez Haloppé
The name: 'The miraculous catch' — the draught of fishes from the Gospel
Neighborhood: Bas-Meudon, the guinguette bank facing Billancourt and the Île Seguin
The speciality: Friture de goujons — small river fish fried and eaten whole, with a dry white wine
Painted by: Alfred Sisley (1878, from the hill above) and Marie-François Firmin-Girard (Salon of 1884, the terrace itself)
In A Moveable Feast: Named in 'People of the Seine' as one of the best places to eat the river's fish
Today: Demolished — the riverfront near 66–68 route de Vaugirard, nothing of the restaurant left

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of La Pêche Miraculeuse at Bas-Meudon, its two-storey verandah running the length of the building beneath a painted signboard, diners at cloth-laid tables on the pavement terrace — The verandah front, the signboard running its whole length, and the proprietor's name painted along the edge of the canopy.Editorial illustration

The restaurant's green-and-cream verandah in summer light, bay trees in tubs along the terrace and the restaurant's name lettered across the gable of the building behind — Lunch on the terrace in the years before the works came. The upper gallery held the tables with the river view.Artistic reconstruction

Timeline

1867
Boats begin running down from Paris to the Bas-Meudon banks after the exposition, and the guinguettes follow.
1878
Alfred Sisley paints La Seine au Bas-Meudon from the hillside, the restaurant below him on the bank.
1884
Firmin-Girard shows Le dimanche au Bas-Meudon, the restaurant's own terrace, at the Salon; a Paris dining society is meeting here for the summer.
1889
The Firmin-Girard canvas is exhibited again at the Exposition Universelle.
1890s
Félix Faure, President of the Republic, takes his Friday meals here with Marguerite Steinheil.
c. 1900
The restaurant is photographed repeatedly for the postcard trade, the Seine and its terrace in frame.
1921
A press photograph shows the Hôtel de la Pêche Miraculeuse still standing beside the Restaurant de la Grotte.
1920s
Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson come out for the fried goujon when there is money for the trip.
Later
Renault's expansion from Billancourt consumes the riverside quarter; the restaurant does not survive it.

On the map

Related books

Setting of the story

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · 1964

Named in 'People of the Seine' as the best place to eat the goujon the river fishermen caught — an open-air restaurant built out over the water at Bas-Meudon.

Writers who knew this place

Ernest Hemingway

American · Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.

Ernest Hemingway wrote about La Pêche Miraculeuse in A Moveable Feast.

Within walking distance

The Meudon pavilion in color — ivy over pale walls, green shutters, the address plaque on the garden wall

House · Meudon, above the Seine

25ter Route des Gardes

The hillside pavilion where Louis-Ferdinand Céline spent his last decade — writing the German trilogy on the ground floor while Lucette taught dance upstairs — and where Rigodon was finished the day before he died.

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.