Street · Saint-Germain-des-Prés · 6e arrondissement

Rue Bonaparte

The buildingStill standing

Getting inWalk straight in

What's there nowStill the same

The street that stitches the Left Bank together — river to Beaux-Arts to Saint-Germain to Saint-Sulpice — and the nightly walk Henry Miller could not stop remembering.

Address: Rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris

Illustration The Rue Bonaparte at nightfall, amber lamps and a violet sky over the wet street

Down the Rue Bonaparte at night — the walk the novel could not stop remembering.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

Rue Bonaparte runs the Left Bank's whole argument in ten minutes: from the quai and the École des Beaux-Arts, past the church and cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, down to the quiet of Saint-Sulpice. Painters' suppliers, print dealers, and antiquaires lined it through the era, and it crosses the boulevard at the exact corner where the Deux Magots' terrace watches the church.

In Tropic of Cancer the street carries the book's wound. The narrator remembers walking it every night with Mona only a year before — the happy version of a marriage the novel spends its length grieving. Miller gives the street no description at all; he doesn't need one. It is the route itself, walked nightly and then lost, that does the work — our purest example of an address holding a feeling.

The street's afterlife kept its literary weight: Sartre lived at No. 42 above the square's corner through the existentialist decades, and the Beaux-Arts end still feeds the quarter its art students. The walk from river to square is unchanged, and still best taken at night.

In their words

And it was down the Rue Bonaparte that only a year before Mona and I used to walk every night…

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Key facts

What it is: The 6e's spine — river, Beaux-Arts, Saint-Germain, Saint-Sulpice in one straight line
In the novel: The nightly walk with Mona, remembered a year too late — the book's tenderest geography
Landmarks along it: The École des Beaux-Arts at the river end; the Deux Magots corner at the boulevard
Later resident: Sartre, at No. 42, through the existentialist years
Today: Open — galleries, antiquaires, and the same ten-minute walk

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Rue Bonaparte at dusk, wet pavement catching the lamplight between shuttered façades — The night walk, rendered in ink — every lamp of it.Editorial illustration

The Rue Bonaparte at nightfall, amber lamps and a violet sky over the wet street — Down the Rue Bonaparte at night — the walk the novel could not stop remembering.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1600s–1800s
The street assembles from riverside lanes; the Beaux-Arts anchors its northern end.
c. 1928–29
The nightly walks with Mona that Miller will mourn in Tropic of Cancer.
1946
Sartre moves to No. 42, and the street inherits a second literary era.
Today
The walk from quai to square survives intact.

On the map

Related books

Depicted in its pages

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 1934

The nightly walks with Mona, remembered a year too late — the book's tenderest stretch of pavement.

Writers who knew this place

Janet Flanner

American · American journalist who wrote The New Yorker's fortnightly Letter from Paris under the pen name Genêt for fifty years, from 1925 to 1975, and whose dispatches are a running record of the city between the wars, under German occupation, and after.

Lived here · 1922–1939

Flanner and Solita Solano took a room at the Hôtel Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 36 rue Bonaparte, in the autumn of 1922 and stayed sixteen years. A photograph of the room in her papers at the Library of Congress carries a caption in her own hand: she wrote the first New Yorker Letter from Paris there in 1925, and every letter and profile after it until September 1939. She moved to the Hôtel Continental on the rue de Castiglione, across the river, in 1949.

— [Janet Flanner's room at 36 rue Bonaparte, Paris] — Janet Flanner and Solita Solano Papers; Flanner, Janet (1892–1978); Love letters from Paris

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 · 1928–1930

The nightly walks with Mona that Tropic of Cancer mourns — a route walked habitually before the novel's Paris begins.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Within walking distance

Apartment · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

28 rue Jacob

Colette's first marital home in Paris, a third-floor apartment she took with her husband Willy in 1893.

Visit the place

Salon · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

20 rue Jacob

The courtyard pavilion where Natalie Clifford Barney held her Friday salon for sixty years, and the small Doric temple in its garden.

Visit the place

Restaurant · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Michaud's

The smart restaurant of the quarter — where the hungry Hemingways watched the Joyce family dine, and where F. Scott Fitzgerald asked the question answered in 'A Matter of Measurements.'

Visit the place

The same view in colour, pale stone facades and a grey-green awning under an overcast sky, the spire showing above the roofs

Quarter · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Saint-Germain-des-Prés

The Left Bank quarter around the abbey church, where the cafés doubled as offices and the bars above and below them ran the other half of post-war Paris.

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.