Depicted in its pages
Tropic of Cancer
Scenes at the Dôme's bar run through the novel — Miller's 1930s headquarters, a decade after Jake Barnes walked past its terrace.
Le Dôme
Still standing
In, as a customer
Still the same
The noisy common room of Montparnasse and the setting of 'With Pascin at the Dôme' — the café for watching the show, not for working.
- 108 Bd du Montparnasse, 75014 Paris
- 1898–present
Illustration
The place, briefly
The Dôme opened in 1898 at the Vavin crossroads and got there first: before the Rotonde across the street, before the Select, before the Coupole. By the 1900s its regulars had a name — the Dômiers — and the terrace was the clubhouse of an international art colony that argued in German, Yiddish, Russian, and eventually American. When the twenties made Montparnasse the capital of modern art, the Dôme was its floor of parliament.
Blaise Cendrars belonged to the terrace crowd too. Michel Seuphor, chronicler of the abstract painters, remembered the Dôme as the place where on a single day you could meet Marinetti passing through, Cendrars back from America, Robert Delaunay, Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara and Ilya Ehrenburg.
Hemingway drew a hard line between cafés for working and cafés for performing, and the Dôme sat firmly on the performing side — in A Moveable Feast he is scathing about its crowd of people posing as artists. But the book's warmest café chapter happens here anyway: an evening with the painter Jules Pascin, holding court with two of his models, generous and funny and already carrying the sadness that would end him. 'With Pascin at the Dôme' is the era's café life in one scene — the charm, the talent, and the bill that eventually comes.
Pascin hanged himself in 1930, on the eve of his own gallery opening, and Montparnasse's golden decade effectively closed with him. The Dôme survived its own legend the way Paris institutions do: by becoming an excellent, expensive restaurant. The terrace at the crossroads still operates, and the name on the awning hasn't changed in a century and a quarter.
In their words
I went out onto the sidewalk and walked down toward the Boulevard St. Michel, passed the tables of the Rotonde, still crowded, looked across the street at the Dome, its tables running out to the edge of the pavement.
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.
Paris! Meaning the Café Select, the Dôme, the Flea Market, the American Express.
Key facts
- 1898, first of the great Vavin crossroads cafés
- Café — the parliament floor of the Montparnasse art colony
- Montparnasse, at the Vavin crossroads
- Pascin, Picasso, Kisling, Man Ray, Kiki de Montparnasse
- Still open — now a celebrated seafood restaurant under the same name
Documentary photographs
In images
Timeline
Opens at the Vavin crossroads; the regulars become the 'Dômiers.'
The international art colony adopts it — the first sorting house of Montparnasse.
The Anglo-American wave arrives; the terrace becomes the era's stage set.
The evening with Jules Pascin and his models, later the chapter 'With Pascin at the Dôme.'
Pascin's suicide closes the golden decade; the quarter's center of gravity never fully recovers.
Still open at the same corner, awning and name intact.
On the map
Related books
Mentioned in passing
The Sun Also Rises
The other corner of Jake's nightly geography — he predicts the taxi drivers will make it the Rotonde's successor within ten years.
Recalled in the memoir
A Moveable Feast
The noisy heart of Montparnasse café life and the setting of 'With Pascin at the Dôme.' Visually iconic — neon sign, corner terrace — and still open.
Depicted in its pages
Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios
Scandinavians, British, and Americans — the Dôme's row in the café census, plus the painters in négligé dodging the tourists in pearls.
Writers who knew this place
Henry Miller
Frequented by · 1930–1939
Miller's principal café of the 1930s — Brassaï's memoir of the Paris years opens on the Dôme's terrace, and the novel stages scenes at its bar.
D. H. Lawrence
Frequented by · 1929
The café was a few doors along the same boulevard as his hotel, and he went there during his month in the city. No source records who he sat with.
Blaise Cendrars
Frequented by
Michel Seuphor's 1957 history of abstract painting recalls the Dôme terrace as the place where, on the same day, one could meet Cendrars back from America alongside Delaunay, Arp, Tzara and Ehrenburg; a Montparnasse café history also counts him among those who came to the Dôme to drink and talk.
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway wrote about Le Dôme in The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast.
Sisley Huddleston
Sisley Huddleston wrote about Le Dôme in Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios.
Artists who knew this place
Grégoire Michonze
They met at the Dôme in 1928 and stayed friends for life — Miller prefaced the catalog of Michonze's 1959 London exhibition, and the painter's rue de Seine studio appears in The Henry Miller Odyssey film.
Within walking distance
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
The Dingo Bar
The American bar where Ernest Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald in late April 1925 — two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published.
Visit the place
La Rotonde
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.
Visit the place
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 placeThe 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.