Depicted in its pages
Tropic of Cancer
The square's quiet, deserted evenings — one of the novel's stillest images of the Left Bank.
Place Saint-Sulpice
Still standing
Walk straight in
Still the same
The quiet square between Saint-Germain and the Luxembourg — the fountain, the pigeons, the towered church, and a stillness three generations of writers noticed.
- Pl. Saint-Sulpice, 75006 Paris
Illustration
The place, briefly
The square takes its name and its gravity from the church — Saint-Sulpice, nearly a century in the building, its mismatched towers looming over one of the calmest open spaces on the Left Bank. Visconti's fountain of four bishops arrived in the 1840s, the plane trees followed, and the square settled into the character every visitor remarks on: a pocket of provincial quiet a few minutes from the boulevard's noise.
That quiet is precisely what the writers kept noticing. Henry Miller, drifting broke through the quarter in the 1930s, registered the square's deserted evening calm in Tropic of Cancer. And the stillness has a supporting role in an earlier hunger: the narrow streets around Saint-Sulpice offered a route between the Luxembourg and the river where a man avoiding the smell of restaurants could walk without temptation — a geography A Moveable Feast readers know well.
The square has resisted its century better than most places in these pages: church, fountain, trees, and café all still in place. It remains what it was — the Left Bank's best room for doing nothing in.
In their words
The Place St. Sulpice, so quiet and deserted…
Key facts
- The square before the church of Saint-Sulpice, with Visconti's fountain of the four bishops
- Begun 1646, a century in the building — the second-largest in Paris, Delacroix murals inside
- Miller's quiet, deserted square of the 1930s; the hungry writer's detour of the 1920s
- Open — square, fountain, and towers essentially as the era knew them
In images
Timeline
The church is begun; the square grows up before its west front.
Visconti's fountain of the four bishops takes the center of the square.
Miller's Paris — the square's evening emptiness makes it into Tropic of Cancer.
Unchanged in its essentials — the quarter's quietest public room.
On the map
Related books
Writers who knew this place
Henry Miller
Henry Miller wrote about Place Saint-Sulpice in Tropic of Cancer.
Within walking distance
58 Rue de Vaugirard
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's Left Bank apartment in the summer of 1928, facing the Luxembourg Gardens — the address of Zelda's ballet discipline and Scott's stalled novel.
Visit the place
Le Tournon
The café below the Senate that served as the unofficial headquarters of Black American writers in postwar Paris, with Richard Wright at the center and James Baldwin among the regulars.
Visit the place
Le Fiacre (4 rue du Cherche-Midi)
The restaurant-above, bar-below house on the rue du Cherche-Midi that became the centre of gay Paris in the 1950s, and one of two bars named as models for Guillaume's bar in Giovanni's Room.
Visit the place
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 placeThe 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.