Landmark · Île de la Cité · 4e arrondissement

Notre-Dame de Paris

The buildingStill standing

Getting inWalk straight in

What's there nowStill the same

The cathedral seen at night from the wooden footbridge off the Quai de Béthune — the still point of the finest walk in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, answered a decade later from the same river in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

Address: 6 Parvis Notre-Dame — Pl. Jean-Paul II, 75004 Paris

Illustration The Seine at dusk, lamps glowing along the tree-lined quai and Notre-Dame lit above the water downstream

The view from the quai after dark — the cathedral exactly as Hemingway serves it in The Sun Also Rises.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

The cathedral needs no literary introduction, but Ernest Hemingway gives it one of the era's best anyway in The Sun Also Rises, his 1926 novel. After dinner at Madame Lecomte's, the narrator Jake Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton walk around the Île Saint-Louis under the trees and cross toward the Left Bank on the wooden footbridge from the Quai de Béthune. From the bridge they stop and look down the river at the cathedral — which Jake sees, in the book's phrase, 'squatting against the night sky' — with the island dark behind them and the houses high against the light. Two sentences, and the most photographed building in Europe becomes an animal resting on the water.

The footbridge itself is a small time-capsule. The old Pont de la Tournelle had been taken down after the war, and while its replacement was being built the crossing was a temporary wooden footbridge — which is exactly what Bill and Jake use in 1925. The stone Pont de la Tournelle that opened in 1928, with Sainte Geneviève on her pillar facing east, now stands where the planks were; the downriver view of the apse and the flying buttresses is unchanged.

The cathedral's own story since needs only two dates that every reader now carries: the fire of April 2019, which took the roof and the spire while the world watched, and December 2024, when it reopened, rebuilt. The night view from the Tournelle crossing survived both — still the best free thing in Paris, exactly as the 1926 novel serves it.

In their words

Notre-Dame rises tomb-like from the water.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky. We crossed to the left bank of the Seine by the wooden foot-bridge from the Quai de Bethune, and stopped on the bridge and looked down the river at Notre Dame. Standing on the bridge the island looked dark, the houses were high against the sky, and the trees were shadows.

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Chapter 8

Key facts

Built: Begun 1163; substantially complete by the mid-fourteenth century
In The Sun Also Rises: The night view downriver from the wooden footbridge off the Quai de Béthune
In Tropic of Cancer: Rising tomb-like from the water — Miller's answer, a decade on
The footbridge: A temporary crossing — replaced in 1928 by the Pont de la Tournelle
2019–2024: Burned, rebuilt, and reopened
Today: Open — and the view from the bridge is intact

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Seine at evening, barges moored below the lamplit quai and Notre-Dame rising down the river — Down the river, Notre-Dame against the evening sky — the walk's own view.Editorial illustration

The Seine at dusk, lamps glowing along the tree-lined quai and Notre-Dame lit above the water downstream — The view from the quai after dark — the cathedral exactly as Hemingway serves it in The Sun Also Rises.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1163
Construction begins under Bishop Maurice de Sully.
1925
The night of the great walk in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises — the view from the wooden footbridge.
1928
The rebuilt Pont de la Tournelle replaces the temporary wooden crossing.
2019
The fire of 15 April destroys the roof and spire.
2024
Reopens in December, restored.

On the map

Related books

Depicted in its pages

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 1934

The cathedral seen from the river — one of the novel's set-piece descriptions of night-time Paris, answering Hemingway's view from the footbridge.

Depicted in its pages

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 1926

Seen from the wooden footbridge off the Quai de Béthune, dark against the night sky — the quiet center of the novel's Paris.

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.

Henry Miller wrote about Notre-Dame de Paris in Tropic of Cancer.

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 Notre-Dame de Paris in The Sun Also Rises.

Within walking distance

The weathered green and gold Shakespeare and Company storefront today, a reader browsing at the window, the rue de la Bûcherie sign above

Bookshop · Latin Quarter

Shakespeare and Company (Rue de la Bûcherie)

George Whitman's bookshop by the Seine — opened as Le Mistral in 1951, renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964 with Sylvia Beach's blessing, and still sleeping writers among its shelves.

Visit the place

Hotel · Quai Saint-Michel

Hôtel de Suède

The small Left Bank hotel on the quai Saint-Michel, facing Notre-Dame, where Godard shot the long bedroom scene of Breathless in Room 12. The hotel closed in 1993; the site is now the Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame.

Visit the place

Nightclub · Latin Quarter (Panthéon)

Bal Musette

A working-class accordion dance hall in the Latin Quarter — the neighborhood danced there most nights, and the expatriate crowd borrowed it on Mondays.

Visit the place

The riverside restaurant at dusk, warm light spilling from its windows onto the wet quai beside the Seine

Restaurant · Île Saint-Louis

Madame Lecomte's

The riverside table on the far side of the Île Saint-Louis — wonderful food, Madame Lecomte at the door, and a forty-five-minute wait since the Americans found it.

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.