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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
IllustrationLe 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 Select arrived at the carrefour Vavin in 1923, after the Dôme and the Rotonde had already divided the crossroads between them, and found its opening by simply refusing to close: it advertised itself as an American bar open all night, the first in the quarter. That single fact reorganized Montparnasse evenings. Wherever the night began, it finished at the Select, because nowhere else was still serving.

It is the café The Sun Also Rises keeps returning to. Harvey Stone — the broke writer-about-cafés of The Sun Also Rises — sits alone on the terrace behind a pile of saucers, needing a shave and waiting for someone to talk to; taxis from the Right Bank empty out in front of it; and the novel's great walk across Paris — the island, the river, the climb through the Latin Quarter — comes down the boulevard past the Rotonde's lights and lands, where else, at the Select. Hemingway seats his cast here more often than anywhere else in the city.[1]

The café's later legend kept pace with its opening decade. In 1927 the terrace produced one of the era's famous rows, when Isadora Duncan's protest over the Sacco and Vanzetti executions boiled into a fracas; in 1929 the poet Hart Crane fought the waiters over a bar bill and spent a week in La Santé for it. The Select absorbed it all and kept the lights on. It is still open at the same address, still late, and still called by the same one-word name everyone in the novel uses.

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.[2]

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.

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

The corner that stayed open when the rest of the crossroads went dark.Editorial illustration
The terrace today — neon on, chairs out, same name in the same script.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1923

    Opens at the Vavin crossroads, billing itself an American bar open all night.

  2. 1925

    The summer crowd whose Pamplona trip becomes Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises makes it their nightly terminus.

  3. 1926

    The novel publishes with the Select as its Paris anchor — more scenes here than at any other café.

  4. 1927

    Isadora Duncan's Sacco-and-Vanzetti protest erupts into the terrace's most famous row.

  5. 1929

    Hart Crane brawls with the waiters and is marched off to La Santé.

  6. 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

Cover of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

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.

Cover of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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.

Cover of Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios by Sisley Huddleston

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!'

Cover of The Street I Know by Harold Stearns

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.

Cover of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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

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

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)

Illustrated portrait of James Baldwin

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

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

Illustrated portrait of Harold Stearns

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.

People who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

French · Painter

Chagall was among the Montparnasse regulars at the Select after it opened in 1925.

Within walking distance

La Coupole's dining room today, green velvet booths and gilded painted pillars under the Art Deco ceiling

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

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
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
References

References

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

  1. 1↑The Sun Also Rises

    Novel
    Ernest Hemingway, 1926
    Used for

    Primary text included as part of the documented record for Le Select.

  2. 2↑Sur les traces de l'écrivain James Baldwin à Paris

    Website
    Ville de Paris
    Used for

    The City of Paris walk through Baldwin's Paris names the addresses he actually used — the Café de Flore, Le Tournon, Les Deux Magots and the Hôtel de Verneuil — all of them in Saint-Germain rather than Montparnasse.

    View source

  3. 3Giovanni's Room

    Novel
    Dial Press, 1956
    Used for

    Primary text included as part of the documented record for Le Select.

  1. 4Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios

    Memoir
    Sisley Huddleston, 1928
    Used for

    First-person evidence and historical context used in preparing the Le Select page.

  2. 5OpenStreetMap

    Map data
    Used for

    Map data used to verify addresses, geographic coordinates, and the placement associated with Le Select.

    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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