Café · Saint-Germain-des-Prés · 6e arrondissement

Les Deux Magots

The buildingStill standing

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowStill the same

The famous literary terrace where the expat crowd gathered. Ernest Hemingway came here, though he preferred La Closerie for actual work.

Address: 6 Pl. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 75006 Paris
Years: 1885–present

Illustration Les Deux Magots today, green and white awnings and rattan café chairs facing the church

The famous terrace today, facing the oldest church in Paris.

Editorial illustration

The story

James Baldwin's first day in Paris

James Baldwin landed in Paris in November 1948 with forty dollars and no French. Accounts of that first day put him on this terrace within hours of arriving, where Richard Wright greeted him by name.

Wright was the reason he had got there at all. Four years earlier he had read the twenty-year-old Baldwin's unfinished first novel and backed him for the Eugene F. Saxton fellowship, which Baldwin won in 1945 and which eventually paid for the crossing. The older writer was by then the most famous Black novelist in America and had been living in Paris since 1946. Meeting him on the terrace of the Deux Magots was the closest thing to an official welcome the city offered.

It lasted about four months. In the spring of 1949 Baldwin published Everybody's Protest Novel in the Paris magazine Zero, an essay that used Wright's Native Son as its example of what he thought the protest novel got wrong. Wright took it personally, and confronted him about it on the day Zero published it, at Brasserie Lipp a few hundred metres up the boulevard. The friendship never fully recovered.

They quarreled a second time four years later, and that argument did happen here. In 1953 the two of them argued again on this terrace, with the novelist Chester Himes present, in an evening that carried on afterwards at a Martinican café nearby. Wright and Himes each described that night differently afterwards. Because the two occasions are so often told as one story, the 1949 break over the essay is regularly misplaced in this room; it belongs to Lipp.

The City of Paris still names Les Deux Magots among Baldwin's favorite cafés, so whatever the two men had done to each other, he kept using the room.

Key facts

Opened: 1885, on the site of the Aux Deux Magots novelty shop
What it was: Café — the meeting terrace of literary Saint-Germain
Neighborhood: Saint-Germain-des-Prés, facing the abbey church
Notable regulars: Verlaine, Joyce, Breton and the Surrealists, Picasso, Sartre and Beauvoir
Today: Still open; the two wooden magots still watch from their column

Documentary photographs

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

Ernest Hemingway in uniform with Janet Flanner at Les Deux Magots, Paris, 1944 — Hemingway and Janet Flanner at the café in August 1944, both in US war-correspondent uniform.1944 · David Scherman for Life magazine; copyright Time, Inc. · Fair use

The corner frontage and terrace of Les Deux Magots on the boulevard Saint-Germain — The Saint-Germain terrace in 2011 — the café keeps the name of the two Chinese figures inside, a relic of the novelty shop it replaced.2011 · DIMSFIKAS, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of Les Deux Magots, wicker chairs and round tables under the awnings on the square — The terrace on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés.Editorial illustration

Les Deux Magots today, green and white awnings and rattan café chairs facing the church — The famous terrace today, facing the oldest church in Paris.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1812
The Aux Deux Magots drapery opens, its sign bearing the two Chinese figures.
1885
The café takes over the site and the name; the statues stay.
1920s
The Surrealists and the expatriate Americans make the terrace the quarter's common room; Hemingway meets Joyce here.
1933
The house founds the Prix des Deux Magots; Raymond Queneau takes the first award.
1940s
Sartre and Beauvoir migrate between here and the Flore, writing through the Occupation.
1948
Richard Wright greets the newly arrived James Baldwin on the terrace, on Baldwin's first day in Paris.
Today
Still open on the square, terrace intact, prize still awarded.

On the map

Questions before you go

Why is Les Deux Magots famous?

For the writers who used its terrace. Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé drank here in the nineteenth century; André Breton ran the Surrealists from it in the 1920s; Ernest Hemingway met James Joyce here; Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir worked here through the Occupation; and the novelist James Baldwin was greeted on the terrace by Richard Wright on his first day in Paris in 1948. The café has awarded its own literary prize since 1933.

What does Les Deux Magots mean?

It means "the two figurines". The name came from a novelty and silk drapery on the site whose sign carried two Chinese figures, called magots in French. The café took over the premises in 1885 and kept both the name and the statues, which still sit on a column inside the room.

Did James Baldwin go to Les Deux Magots?

Yes, from his first day in the city. The novelist James Baldwin arrived in Paris in November 1948, and accounts of that day place him on this terrace being greeted by Richard Wright, the writer whose recommendation had won him the fellowship that paid for the trip. The City of Paris names Les Deux Magots among his favorite cafés.

Did Ernest Hemingway meet James Joyce at Les Deux Magots?

By Hemingway's own account, yes. He described sitting here with Joyce — who drank dry sherry — talking about writing. Hemingway distinguished between cafés for working and cafés for talking, and he put the Deux Magots firmly in the second category, preferring La Closerie des Lilas when he actually wanted to write.

What is the difference between Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore?

About fifty metres, and two different house legends. Les Deux Magots is the older address and its fame runs from the Symbolists through the Surrealists to the expatriate 1920s. The Café de Flore's reputation is mostly post-war and belongs to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Both sat on the same daily circuit, and most regulars — Baldwin included — used both.

Related books

Recalled in the memoir

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · 1964

The famous literary terrace where the expat crowd gathered. Hemingway came here, though he preferred La Closerie for actual work.

Writers who knew this place

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.

Frequented by

Part of his Left Bank circuit, though he preferred the quieter Closerie for working.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

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 · 1948

The City of Paris names Les Deux Magots among Baldwin's favorite cafés, and accounts of his first day in Paris in November 1948 put him at this terrace being greeted by Richard Wright, who had helped him get there.

— Sur les traces de l'écrivain James Baldwin à Paris; Americans in Paris, James Baldwin: A Freedom Fighter Without a Home

Guides featuring Les Deux Magots

Take them with you.

Ink and wash drawing of James Baldwin standing in a wet Paris street with a suitcase in one hand and a coat gathered against the rain, a Métropolitain entrance behind him and a domed church down the boulevard

GuideJames Baldwin’s Paris: A Self-Guided Walking Tour of the Left BankJames Baldwin arrived in November 1948 with forty dollars, and for nearly a decade his Paris fit inside one Left Bank neighborhood: Saint-Germain-des-Prés, its hotels, cafés and clubs. You can walk it all in an afternoon.Read the guide

Within walking distance

The Montana today, dark grey façade with a red cursive neon sign and red curtains behind black window frames

Nightclub · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Le Montana

A Saint-Germain bar of the postwar years, steps from the Café de Flore, that the City of Paris counts among the gay clubs James Baldwin frequented.

Visit the place

Café · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Café de Flore

A few doors from Les Deux Magots and part of the same Left Bank circuit. Later became more associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Visit the place

Apartment · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

26 rue Saint-Benoît

The Saint-Germain address where the City of Paris places James Baldwin as a likely resident in the early 1950s, around the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Visit the place

Restaurant · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Brasserie Lipp

Beer, potato salad, and choucroute after a day's work. Ernest Hemingway considered it one of the best places in Paris.

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.