Café · Montparnasse · 6e arrondissement

Le Select

The buildingStill standing

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowStill the same

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.

Address: 99 Bd du Montparnasse, 75006 Paris
Years: 1923–present

Illustration Le Select at dusk, its name in lights above the awning and the terrace chairs lined up under a warm glow

The terrace today — neon on, chairs out, same name in the same script.

Editorial illustration

The story

The James Baldwin connection, and how thin it is

The story goes that the novelist James Baldwin worked on Giovanni's Room at the Select, and the actor and Baldwin scholar Charles Reese says flatly that this is where he finished it. However, nobody has produced a letter, a diary entry, an interview or a page number stating this as evidence. So we keep it on the record, because it is his only reported tie to Montparnasse café life, and we stop short of stating it as fact. If you have the citation, we want it.

The reason for the caution is geography. Baldwin's Paris was Saint-Germain, twenty minutes north: the Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots, Le Tournon, a room at the Hôtel Verneuil. Those are the addresses the City of Paris names and the ones his biographers use. Montparnasse belonged to the generation before his, and by the late 1940s the crossroads was living off the twenties rather than making anything new.

None of which makes the story impossible. Giovanni's Room is a novel about an American adrift in Paris rooms that are not his, and a café that never closed would have suited a writer with nowhere warm to go.

In their words

I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Select. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.

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

‘I’m coming over some night. The Dingo. That’s the great place, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes. That, or this new dive, The Select.’

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Chapter 5

It is, of course, easy to parody Hemingway: — ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Nothing particular.’ ‘Well, let’s go over to the Select.’ ‘Righto!’ We went over to the Select. I was feeling rather bad. He looked pretty sick too. We sat down. The waiter came — the fat one.

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

Paris! Meaning the Café Select, the Dôme, the Flea Market, the American Express.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Key facts

Opened: 1923 — the first café in Montparnasse to stay open all night
What it was: The late café of the Vavin crossroads, the American crowd's night harbor
Neighborhood: Montparnasse, at the carrefour Vavin
Notable regulars: Hemingway's circle, Isadora Duncan, Hart Crane, later Henry Miller
Today: Still open, still late, terrace intact

Documentary photographs

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

The frontage of the brasserie Le Select at 99 boulevard du Montparnasse — 99 boulevard du Montparnasse in 2008 — opened in 1925, and the one that kept the latest hours, staying open through the night when its neighbors closed.2008 · Airair, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of Le Select's curved corner façade, script lettering over the awning and rattan chairs on the terrace — The corner that stayed open when the rest of the crossroads went dark.Editorial illustration

Le Select at dusk, its name in lights above the awning and the terrace chairs lined up under a warm glow — The terrace today — neon on, chairs out, same name in the same script.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1923
Opens at the Vavin crossroads, billing itself an American bar open all night.
1925
The summer crowd whose Pamplona trip becomes Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises makes it their nightly terminus.
1926
The novel publishes with the Select as its Paris anchor — more scenes here than at any other café.
1927
Isadora Duncan's Sacco-and-Vanzetti protest erupts into the terrace's most famous row.
1929
Hart Crane brawls with the waiters and is marched off to La Santé.
Today
Still open under the same name at the same corner.

On the map

Questions before you go

Why is Le Select famous?

It was the first café at the Montparnasse crossroads to stay open all night, which made it the last stop of every evening in the quarter from 1923 onward. Ernest Hemingway seats the cast of The Sun Also Rises here more often than anywhere else in Paris, and the terrace produced two of the era's better scandals.

Is Le Select in The Sun Also Rises?

Repeatedly — it is the novel's most-used Paris address. Harvey Stone, the broke writer of the book's café scenes, sits on the terrace behind a stack of saucers; taxis from the Right Bank unload in front of it; and the long night walk across Paris ends there. The café is named in the novel exactly as everyone still names it, in one word.

Did James Baldwin write Giovanni's Room at Le Select?

That is the story, and the actor and Baldwin scholar Charles Reese says the Select is where the novelist James Baldwin finished the book. However, nobody has produced a letter, a diary entry, an interview or a page number stating this as evidence. The addresses his biographers and the City of Paris actually name are all in Saint-Germain rather than Montparnasse. We keep the connection on the record and treat it as unproven.

What happened to Hart Crane at Le Select?

The American poet fought the waiters over a bar bill in 1929 and was jailed for a week in La Santé prison for it. Two years earlier the terrace had produced another famous row, when Isadora Duncan's protest against the Sacco and Vanzetti executions turned into a brawl.

Is Le Select still open?

Yes, at 99 boulevard du Montparnasse on the carrefour Vavin, with the terrace intact. It still keeps late hours, which is the habit that made its name in the first place.

Related books

Mentioned in passing

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 1934

Named in the novel as part of the very meaning of Paris — the Montparnasse shorthand for the whole city.

Setting of the story

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 1926

Open when everywhere else has closed — the last stop of every Montparnasse evening, and the long night-walk across Paris ends at its lights.

Depicted in its pages

Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios

Sisley Huddleston · 1928

Where Huddleston sets his affectionate parody of the Hemingway style — 'Well, let's go over to the Select.' 'Righto!'

Recalled in the memoir

The Street I Know

Harold Stearns · 1935

The memoir's Paris headquarters: the terrace where Stearns's expatriate decade pooled — the saucers, the borrowed francs, the racing sheets signed 'Peter Pickem' — recounted from the far side of the recovery.

Setting of the story

Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 1956

David sits here and drinks after reading Hella's letter, looking for a girl and finding Sue instead. The night that follows is the one he spends trying to prove something to himself.

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

Counted among Miller's key Paris cafés — a decade after the Sun Also Rises crowd, the Select was still where the night ended.

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

James Baldwin

American · American novelist and essayist who left Harlem for Paris at twenty-four with forty dollars, and wrote the books that made him the most quoted witness to race, sex and belonging in twentieth-century America.

Frequented by

Held at probable: a secondary account in Bonjour Paris has Baldwin at work on Giovanni's Room at the Select, his one recorded tie to Montparnasse café life. The actor and Baldwin scholar Charles Reese says the same, that the Select is where Baldwin finished the novel. Neither account rests on a letter, a diary entry, an interview, or a page, and a check of the searchable Leeming biography in August 2026 found no Select reference. A better source would replace this one; until one appears the site does not state it as fact.

— Americans in Paris, James Baldwin: A Freedom Fighter Without a Home

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 Le Select 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 Le Select in Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios.

Harold Stearns

American · Editor of the 1922 symposium that sent a generation to France — then Montparnasse's great cautionary tale at the Select, Hemingway's Harvey Stone, and finally his own unsparing chronicler.

Harold Stearns wrote about Le Select in The Street I Know.

Within walking distance

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

Café · Montparnasse

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

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

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.