Les Deux Magots

The name comes from the shop that stood here first: a novelty and silk drapers called Aux Deux Magots, after the two Chinese figurines — magots — on its sign. When the café took over the premises in 1884 it kept the name and the statues, and the two lacquered figures still preside over the room from their column, watching a century of literary Paris order coffee beneath them.

The terrace faces the oldest church tower in Paris, and by the twenties it was the sitting room of the quarter — the place you went to be found. Verlaine and Mallarmé had drunk here; the Surrealists held court under Breton with the discipline of a standing committee; and the young Hemingway used it as neutral ground for the biggest meetings of his apprenticeship. It was at the Deux Magots, by his own account, that he sat with James Joyce — the great man drinking dry sherry — and talked about writing while trying not to say anything foolish.[1][2][3]

Hemingway was clear-eyed about the difference between a café for working and a café for talking; the Deux Magots was for talking. The house understood its role and eventually institutionalised it: in 1933 it founded the Prix des Deux Magots, a literary prize created — with very Left Bank logic — as the irreverent answer to the Goncourt. The first winner was Raymond Queneau. The terrace, the statues, and the self-regard all survive.[1][2]

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.[4][5]

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.[6][5]

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.[7][8][9]

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.[4]