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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
IllustrationThe 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

Down the river, Notre-Dame against the evening sky — the walk's own view.Editorial illustration
The view from the quai after dark — the cathedral exactly as Hemingway serves it in The Sun Also Rises.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1163

    Construction begins under Bishop Maurice de Sully.

  2. 1925

    The night of the great walk in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises — the view from the wooden footbridge.

  3. 1928

    The rebuilt Pont de la Tournelle replaces the temporary wooden crossing.

  4. 2019

    The fire of 15 April destroys the roof and spire.

  5. 2024

    Reopens in December, restored.

On the map

Related books

Cover of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

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.

Cover of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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

Illustrated portrait of Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen

Danish · The Danish shoemaker's son who wrote The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid, and who came to Paris in three separate years across a span of thirty-four: first at twenty-eight on a travel grant from the Danish king, knocking on the door of Victor Hugo, the most famous writer in France, as an unknown; then at thirty-eight, taken round the theatres arm in arm by Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers; and at sixty-two, turning the Paris world's fair of 1867 into a fairy tale.

Frequented by · 1833

The first French book Andersen tried to read during his 1833 stay was Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, published two years earlier. He went to the cathedral daily through that summer to look at the places the novel described, and the reading led him to call on Hugo himself in August.

— Hans Christian Andersen, The Story of My Life (1871); The Timetable Year By Year: A Chronology of Hans Christian Andersen's Life, 1833

Illustrated portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

American · Author of The Scarlet Letter, who passed through Paris for one week in January 1858 on his way from the American consulate at Liverpool to Italy — and wrote it all down. He found the city more magnificent than London and colder than anything in America: "new, bright, magnificent, and desperately cold." He left saying he was quite tired of Paris and longed for home.

Visited by · 1858

January 1858, on two successive days. He studied the carved histories in the arches of the west front, walked right round the building, and came away unmoved by its scale after the English cathedrals.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books, Volume 1 (Project Gutenberg etext) (1871), Hotel de Louvre, January 12th [1858]

Illustrated portrait of Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

British · The English writer of the Jungle Books, Kim and Just So Stories, and in 1907 the first author writing in English to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His love of France began at twelve, when his father turned him loose alone in the Paris Exhibition of 1878 with two francs a day; it ended with the war-graves work that kept him crossing the Channel after his only son was killed at Loos, and with a small French book, Souvenirs of France, published in Paris in 1933.

Visited by · 1878

Kipling was twelve, turned loose in Paris while his father arranged the Indian section of the 1878 Exposition Universelle, and found the cathedral for himself by way of Victor Hugo: "I discovered on my own account Quasimodo's Notre Dame." Forty years later the building took his words back. The Imperial War Graves Commission recorded after his death that the inscriptions on its memorials had all been written, approved or selected by him, and named the memorial in Notre Dame among the handful that were his work alone.

— Rudyard Kipling, Souvenirs of France (1933), Souvenirs of France, part I; Kipling and the Imperial War Graves Commission, by Alastair Wilson

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.

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

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 Notre-Dame de Paris in The Sun Also Rises.

People who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus

Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus

French · Architect

The competition to restore Notre-Dame was launched in 1842 and won in 1844 by Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Their submission proposed a deliberate restraint — "une religieuse discrétion", a complete self-effacement before the building. Lassus died in 1857 with the work unfinished; Viollet-le-Duc carried it on, and the spire they designed together stood until the 2019 fire.

Illustrated portrait of Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Italian · Sculptor, Architect

Bernini went to Notre-Dame on 15 August 1665, the feast of the Assumption, after making his devotions with the fathers of the Oratory. He was in Paris for five months that year to design a new east front for the Louvre and to carve Louis XIV's portrait, and Chantelou's diary follows him to church almost every day of it.

Art & literary movement · c. 1790–1850

Romanticism was seen here first

The argument that feeling, imagination and freedom belong at the centre of art rather than at its edges — settled in Paris, in the 1830s, in a theatre riot and at the Salon.

Enter the movement

Historical period · 5th century to the 15th

Medieval Art was seen here first

Medieval art across a thousand years: Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic traditions, manuscripts, sculpture, stained glass, makers and Paris collections.

Enter the movement

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
Present-day view of the former Hôtel de Suède building at 15 quai Saint-Michel, now Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame

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
Bright color view of the long limestone Hôtel de Jassaud façade beside the Seine

Apartment · Île Saint-Louis

Camille Claudel's studio, 19 quai de Bourbon

The last place Camille Claudel lived and worked — a very small studio at the back of the courtyard of the Hôtel de Jassaud on the Île Saint-Louis, from January 1899 until she was committed in 1913. The building stands and carries a plaque; the studio is private.

Visit the place
Bright present-day view of students, bookstalls and pale stone façades on Boulevard Saint-Michel

Street · Latin Quarter — its spine

Boulevard Saint-Michel

The boulevard that runs from the Seine up past the Sorbonne to the Luxembourg — the main axis of the Latin Quarter, cut through by Haussmann and known for a century as the Boul'Mich. In Down and Out in Paris and London it is where a pair of Orwell's fellow lodgers ran one of the neatest frauds in the book.

Visit the place
References

References

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

  1. 1The Sun Also Rises

    Novel
    Ernest Hemingway, 1926
    Used for

    Primary text included as part of the documented record for Notre-Dame de Paris.

  2. 2notredamedeparis.fr

    Website
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Notre-Dame de Paris page.

    View source

  1. 3OpenStreetMap

    Map data
    Used for

    Map data used to verify addresses, geographic coordinates, and the placement associated with Notre-Dame de Paris.

    View source

  2. 4The Architects of Notre-Dame

    Website
    Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Notre-Dame de Paris page.

    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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