Square · Latin Quarter (Mouffetard) · 5e arrondissement

Place de la Contrescarpe

Name: Place de la Contrescarpe
Address: Pl. de la Contrescarpe, Paris, 75005, FR

The buildingStill standing

Getting inWalk straight in

What's there nowStill the same

The small square at the top of the rue Mouffetard, a minute from Ernest Hemingway's first flat — now one of the quarter's prettiest corners. The novel visits it after dark.

Address: Pl. de la Contrescarpe, 75005 Paris

Illustration The Place de la Contrescarpe in summer light, the fountain playing at the center and café terraces ringing the cobbles

The lighted square today, considerably prettier than Jake Barnes's taxi finds it in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

The Place de la Contrescarpe is the small square where the rue Mouffetard's market slope meets the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève — in the twenties a poor, hard-drinking corner of the quarter, ringed by cheap cafés and lodging houses, with the S bus terminus under its trees. It was the first Paris Hemingway lived in: his flat at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine was a minute downhill, and A Moveable Feast opens onto this square, sour café and all.

Ernest Hemingway crosses the square twice in The Sun Also Rises, his 1926 novel, both times at night, both times beautifully. Early in the book a taxi coming down from the hill passes the trees and the standing bus at the Contrescarpe and turns onto the cobbles of the rue Mouffetard, past lighted bars and late-open shops. And on the great walk of Chapter VIII, his narrator Jake Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton climb the rue du Cardinal Lemoine all the way up from the river until they come out on the square — arc-light shining through the leaves, the S bus ready to start, music coming from a dancing hall — before turning off along the smooth narrow streets toward Montparnasse.

The square has traded poverty for postcards since — the cafés are pleasant now, the fountain is newer than it looks, and the plaque around the corner marks the Hemingway flat — but the geometry is untouched: the trees, the lamplight through the leaves, and five streets of old Paris running off downhill in every direction.

In their words

We crossed the bridge and walked up the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. It was steep walking, and we went all the way up to the Place Contrescarpe. The arc-light shone through the leaves of the trees in the square, and underneath the trees was an S bus ready to start.

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

The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then levelled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard.

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Chapter 4

Key facts

What it is: The small square at the top of the rue Mouffetard
Neighborhood: Latin Quarter, on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève
In the novel: Crossed by night twice — by taxi, and on the Chapter VIII walk
The Hemingway connection: His first flat, at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, is a minute downhill
Today: Still there — gentrified, but the same trees and lamplight

Documentary photographs

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

The Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris, cafés and trees around the central fountain — The square in 2011 — the small tree-ringed place at the top of the rue Mouffetard, a minute downhill from Ernest Hemingway's first Paris flat.2011 · Britchi Mirela, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Place de la Contrescarpe, bicycles leaning on the railed fountain beneath the plane trees, cafés around the edge — The square under its trees — fountain, bicycles, and cafés on every side.Editorial illustration

The Place de la Contrescarpe in summer light, the fountain playing at the center and café terraces ringing the cobbles — The lighted square today, considerably prettier than Jake Barnes's taxi finds it in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1922–1923
Hemingway lives around the corner; the square is his first Paris.
1926
Hemingway crosses it by taxi and on foot in The Sun Also Rises, both times after dark.
1964
Hemingway's memoir A Moveable Feast opens its first chapter on the same square.
Today
The quarter's poorest corner has become one of its prettiest; the S bus is long gone.

On the map

Related books

Mentioned in passing

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 1934

Counted among the narrator's favorite resting places — the square's third literary generation in as many decades.

Setting of the story

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 1926

The small square at the top of the rue Mouffetard, a minute from Hemingway's first flat — now one of the quarter's prettiest corners. The novel visits it after dark.

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.

Frequented by · 1930–1939

One of Miller's favorite resting places in the 1930s — the hillside square kept its pull on broke writers a decade after Hemingway's crowd.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

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 Place de la Contrescarpe in The Sun Also Rises.

Within walking distance

Apartment · Latin Quarter

74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine

Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson's first Paris apartment, on the fifth floor with no running water. He describes it in the opening pages of the book.

Visit the place

The front of 6 rue du Pot de Fer today in colour — green and ochre mosaic tiling around a pale green door, black awnings, geraniums on the ironwork balconies above

Hotel · Latin Quarter (Mouffetard)

6 rue du Pot de Fer (Hotel des Bons Amis)

The cheap Latin Quarter lodging house where Eric Blair lived for eighteen months before he was George Orwell, and the raw material for the Paris half of Down and Out in Paris and London.

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

Street · Latin Quarter, between the Luxembourg and the Panthéon

Rue Soufflot

The street between the Luxembourg gardens and the Panthéon where the narrator of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises stops for coffee and a brioche, on the one morning the novel shows him going to work. He never names the café.

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.