Café · Montparnasse · 6e arrondissement

La Rotonde

The buildingStill standing

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowStill the same

The café every taxi driver delivered Americans to — the novel's driest Montparnasse joke, and before that the painters' living room, where the patron took drawings for drinks.

Address: 105 Bd du Montparnasse, 75006 Paris
Years: 1911–present

Illustration La Rotonde at night, red awnings and glowing red neon over a terrace of red-backed chairs on a wet pavement

The red corner today, lit like a stage set — the taxi drivers still know the way.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

Victor Libion opened the Rotonde in 1911 across the boulevard from the Dôme and ran it on a policy unheard of in the café trade: a broke painter could sit all day over one café crème, and when the money ran out entirely, Père Libion would take a drawing against the tab. The result was the finest unpaid art collection in Paris and a clientele that included Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, Diego Rivera, and Picasso — plus, during the war years, the Russian political exiles who argued revolution at its tables, Trotsky among them.

For Blaise Cendrars, Montparnasse was a home port. Biographical accounts describe the Rotonde as perhaps his favorite gathering place in the quarter — the table where the one-armed poet met his circle among Libion's painters.

By the mid-twenties the painters had mostly decamped and the tourist buses had found the crossroads, which is the Rotonde the novel skewers. Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises' narrator, observes that no matter which Montparnasse café you name, a taxi from the Right Bank delivers you to the Rotonde — and predicts, with a newspaperman's shrug, that in ten years it will be the Dôme instead. He walks past its sad, crowded tables on his way to the Select; the once-radical café had become the place Americans were taken, rather than the place anyone chose.

The joke aged better than the grievance. The Rotonde never closed, and a century on it has settled into the role of grand old café of the carrefour Vavin — red awning, brass, and a name that appears in more memoirs of modern art than any gallery. The canvases Père Libion took in trade would now buy the block.

In their words

The taxi stopped in front of the Rotonde. No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde. Ten years from now it will probably be the Dome. It was near enough, anyway. I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Select.

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Chapter 6

At the Closerie des Lilas you will mostly find Poles. At the Rotonde you will find Italians, Spaniards, and Balkanics — with a sprinkling of French. At the Dome there are Scandinavians, British, and Americans.

— Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (1928)

Occasionally they roll up in beautiful automobiles dressed as for the Opera, swallow-tail coats and white ties, gorgeous evening robes and cloaks; and they make a fine display of pearls and diamonds at the Rotonde. But this is exceptional. Generally they are content to put on rakish clothes as though they were Haroun al-Raschid descending in disguise to the lower town.

— Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (1928)

The three of us used to meet regularly on the terrasse of the Rotonde before going to dinner.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Key facts

Opened: 1911, by Victor Libion — Père Libion to his painters
What it was: The art colony's living room, then the tourists' Montparnasse
Neighborhood: Montparnasse, at the carrefour Vavin
Notable regulars: Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, Rivera, Picasso, Trotsky
Today: Still open — the grand old café of the crossroads

Documentary photographs

Archival and present-day photographs, reproduced with rights verified.

The red awning and corner frontage of La Rotonde at the boulevard du Montparnasse and boulevard Raspail — La Rotonde in 2011, on the Montparnasse–Raspail corner opposite the Dôme — the two faced each other across the junction and divided the quarter between them.2011 · LPLT, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of La Rotonde's corner façade, its name in huge letters across the awning above the terrace chairs — The most conspicuous name on the crossroads — which was rather the problem.Editorial illustration

La Rotonde at night, red awnings and glowing red neon over a terrace of red-backed chairs on a wet pavement — The red corner today, lit like a stage set — the taxi drivers still know the way.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1911
Victor Libion opens the Rotonde opposite the Dôme.
1910s
Drawings accepted against unpaid tabs; the walls fill with Modiglianis. Wartime exiles argue at the tables.
1920s
The painters drift off, the tourist buses arrive, and the Rotonde becomes the café Americans get delivered to.
1926
Hemingway fixes its reputation in The Sun Also Rises with the taxi-driver joke.
Today
Still open at 105 Boulevard du Montparnasse, red awning and all.

On the map

Related books

Depicted in its pages

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 1934

The narrator's circle keeps meeting on the Rotonde's terrace — the tourists' café of the twenties become the broke writers' café of the thirties.

Mentioned in passing

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 1926

Target of the novel's driest joke: name any café in Montparnasse, and the taxi from the Right Bank still delivers you to the Rotonde.

Depicted in its pages

Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios

Sisley Huddleston · 1928

Italians, Spaniards, and Balkanics with a sprinkling of French — the Rotonde's row in Huddleston's café census of the crossroads.

Writers who knew this place

Henry Miller

American · The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.

Frequented by · 1930–1939

A regular terrace of Miller's circle in the 1930s, per the novel and Miller scholarship — the second generation at the crossroads the twenties made famous.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934); Brassaï, Henry Miller: The Paris Years (1995)

Blaise Cendrars

Swiss-born; naturalized French in 1916 · The one-armed adventurer-poet of the Paris avant-garde — La Prose du Transsibérien, Moravagine, the memoir tetralogy — and the living writer Henry Miller ranked above all others.

Frequented by

Soupault's memoir names the Rotonde as Cendrars's favorite gathering place in Montparnasse, and Olivier Renault's Le Paris de Cendrars counts it among his characteristic stops.

— Philippe Soupault, Profils perdus (1963); Olivier Renault, Le Paris de Cendrars

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 Rotonde in The Sun Also Rises.

Sisley Huddleston

British · The Times's man in Paris — the journalist who knew every table in the quarter, French and Anglo-American alike, and wrote the era down while it was happening.

Sisley Huddleston wrote about La Rotonde in Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios.

Artists who knew this place

Amedeo Modigliani

Italian · Painter, Sculptor

A fixture of Père Libion's café from its earliest years — he sketched portraits at the tables and traded drawings for coins, a meal, or a drink, and the Rotonde's walls filled with Modiglianis.

Within walking distance

Café · Montparnasse

Le Dôme

The noisy common room of Montparnasse and the setting of 'With Pascin at the Dôme' — the café for watching the show, not for working.

Visit the place

The same imagined Black Manikin shopfront in colour, cream awnings and green tilework against a pale stone Haussmann façade

Bookshop · Montparnasse

Black Manikin Press (4 Rue Delambre)

Edward Titus's Montparnasse bookshop and small press, where D. H. Lawrence settled terms on 5 April 1929 for the cheap Paris edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover that finally undercut the pirates.

Visit the place

Café · Montparnasse

Le Select

The all-night café of the Vavin crossroads and the closest thing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises has to a home address — the crowd always ends up at the Select.

Visit the place

Restaurant · Montparnasse

La Coupole

The giant brasserie of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, opened in December 1927 with a party the quarter never forgot — Blaise Cendrars was in the opening-night crowd.

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.