The cheap bar across the boulevard from the Café de Flore where James Baldwin drank through his first Paris years, and where he met Lucien Happersberger in 1949.
The room mattered because of exactly where it sat along the dividing lines of post-war Paris.
While Baldwin never named a real-world model for Guillaume's bar in any letter or interview in the public record, biographers have identified La Reine Blanche as the creative epicenter behind the famous meeting in Giovanni's Room.
Ultimately, no scene in the novel is set at La Reine Blanche. The novel came out of it.
In the years after the war, Saint-Germain-des-Prés operated as the center of homosexual Paris. La Reine Blanche supplied the exact conditions needed for a novel about a man who cannot survive being loved where anyone can see it.
Nothing of the room survives to look at today. The bar closed, the hotel above it has been renovated more than once, and the ground floor at 153 gives no sign of what used to be there. Saint-Germain keeps its literary plaques for the Flore and Les Deux Magots forty meters away on the other side of the boulevard.
The quarter's other post-war life, the one that required cheap bars and quiet arrangements with the prefecture, is not commemorated on the street at all. By the 1990s, the center of homosexual Paris had moved out of Saint-Germain entirely, migrating first to the rue Sainte-Anne, then to Les Halles, and finally to Le Marais, where it remains today.
The Hôtel Taranne opens at 153 boulevard Saint-Germain, on the boulevard Haussmann had just cut through the quarter.
A photograph shows the café «A la Reine Blanche» lettered across the hotel's ground floor.
James Baldwin arrives in Paris with forty dollars, and falls in with the crowd who drink here.
Baldwin meets Lucien Happersberger, a seventeen-year-old Swiss painter, in this bar.
Baldwin finishes Go Tell It on the Mountain at the Happersberger family chalet in the Swiss Alps.
Giovanni's Room is published, dedicated to Happersberger. Its invented bar is later said to draw on this one and on Le Fiacre.
A model for the book's version
Nicholas Boggs identifies the bar where David meets Giovanni as this one — the room where Baldwin met Lucien Happersberger in 1949, seven years before the novel appeared dedicated to him. No scene is set here; Guillaume's bar is invented.
Frequented by
Campbell names La Reine Blanche as the bar Baldwin and his circle used in his first Paris years, and describes the crowd there as the people who kept him fed. He met Lucien Happersberger in it in 1949. The habit is documented; the street number is not, and is worked out from a photograph of the café at the Grand Hôtel Taranne.
Happersberger met James Baldwin in this bar in 1949, at seventeen, newly arrived in Paris to paint. That single evening is what the record establishes. He was part of the same broke Left Bank crowd, so more visits are likely, but no account says so.
Beer, potato salad, and choucroute after a day's work. Ernest Hemingway considered it one of the best places in Paris.
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A few doors from Les Deux Magots and part of the same Left Bank circuit. Later became more associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
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A Saint-Germain bar of the postwar years, steps from the Café de Flore, that the City of Paris counts among the gay clubs James Baldwin frequented.
Visit the place
The Saint-Germain address where the City of Paris places James Baldwin as a likely resident in the early 1950s, around the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain.
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.
