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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
IllustrationLa 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.

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

The most conspicuous name on the crossroads — which was rather the problem.Editorial illustration
The red corner today, lit like a stage set — the taxi drivers still know the way.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1911

    Victor Libion opens the Rotonde opposite the Dôme.

  2. 1910s

    Drawings accepted against unpaid tabs; the walls fill with Modiglianis. Wartime exiles argue at the tables.

  3. 1920s

    The painters drift off, the tourist buses arrive, and the Rotonde becomes the café Americans get delivered to.

  4. 1926

    Hemingway fixes its reputation in The Sun Also Rises with the taxi-driver joke.

  5. Today

    Still open at 105 Boulevard du Montparnasse, red awning and all.

On the map

Related books

Cover of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

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.

Cover of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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.

Cover of Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios by Sisley Huddleston

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

Illustrated portrait of Henry Miller

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)

Illustrated portrait of Blaise Cendrars

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

Illustrated portrait of Ernest Hemingway

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.

Illustrated portrait of Sisley Huddleston

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.

People who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Amedeo Modigliani

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.

Illustrated portrait of Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

French · Painter

Chagall drank and argued at the Rotonde during his pre-war years at La Ruche and again after his return in the 1920s, among the Montparnasse painters.

Within walking distance

Color street view of the UGC Rotonde corner building at 103–105 boulevard du Montparnasse

Apartment · Montparnasse (Notre-Dame-des-Champs)

103 boulevard du Montparnasse

Where Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 and grew up with her sister Hélène — in the middle of Montparnasse, the quarter she would spend most of her life within a few streets of.

Visit the place
Le Dôme today, its terrace and awning under the plane trees of the Boulevard du Montparnasse

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
Colour photorealistic view of 4 rue Delambre beneath a bright blue sky

Bookshop · Montparnasse (14th)

At the Sign of the Black Manikin, 4 rue Delambre

Edward Titus's Montparnasse bookshop and press, which sold copies of the privately printed first edition of Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack.

Visit the place
References

References

The sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document La Rotonde, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.

  1. 1The Sun Also Rises

    Novel
    Ernest Hemingway, 1926
    Used for

    Primary text included as part of the documented record for La Rotonde.

  2. 2Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios

    Memoir
    Sisley Huddleston, 1928
    Used for

    First-person evidence and historical context used in preparing the La Rotonde page.

  1. 3OpenStreetMap

    Map data
    Used for

    Map data used to verify addresses, geographic coordinates, and the placement associated with La Rotonde.

    View source

  2. 4La Rotonde, Montparnasse — collection record

    Official record
    Musée Carnavalet, Paris Musées
    Used for

    Official record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.

    View source
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Why these sources are here

These references provide the documented foundation for this page's history and context. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.

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