Saint-Germain-des-Prés

The place, briefly

Saint-Germain-des-Prés is a few hundred metres of boulevard and the streets running off it, and for about forty years it was the most concentrated literary address in Europe. The abbey church at its centre is the oldest in Paris. Everything the quarter is famous for happened within five minutes' walk of it.

The reason was economic before it was cultural. Rooms here were cold and cheap, cafés were warm and stayed open, and a writer without a stove could work all day at a table for the price of one coffee. Guillaume Apollinaire ran a magazine out of the Café de Flore from 1913, treating the ground floor as an editorial office with waiter service. Thirty years later Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote through the Occupation at the Flore's upstairs tables for exactly the same reason: the café had heating and their flats did not.

By the late 1940s the quarter had a second life running alongside the famous one. Homosexual Paris was here, and it was not particularly hidden. The historian Georges Sideris lists the Flore itself with La Reine Blanche, the Royal Saint-Germain and the Pergola as the cafés where men were openly visible. A few streets south, Le Fiacre on the rue du Cherche-Midi ran a smart restaurant upstairs so that the bar downstairs would be left alone by the police. The arrangement worked for about a decade.

James Baldwin arrived in November 1948 with forty dollars and no French, and this is the quarter he landed in. He drank at La Reine Blanche, across the boulevard from the Flore, among a crowd of writers and runaways who between them kept him fed. He met Lucien Happersberger there in 1949. Giovanni's Room, published seven years later, is dedicated to Happersberger, and although Baldwin invents its bar and gives it no address, the two rooms usually named as its models are both within a few minutes of this church.

The quarter is also in the novel by name, twice, and both times it is doing work. David meets Hella here — that was how I met her, in a bar in St. Germain des Pres, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her — which makes this the address where the engagement that the book destroys begins. Baldwin spells it St. Germain des Pres throughout.

The second mention is the spire. Standing at the end of a long curving street, David sees the trees of the boulevard, straw chairs piled high in front of the cafés, and the great stone spire of the abbey, which he and Hella believed the most magnificent in Paris. It is the church the quarter is named for, the oldest in the city, and it stands at one end of the street while the bars David actually uses stand at the other.

The quarter's post-war reputation is usually told as existentialism, jazz cellars and Juliette Gréco, and all of that is true. What the account tends to leave out is that the same square kilometre was also where a criminalised social world could operate in daylight, because it had enough money and enough celebrity passing through it to make the prefecture cautious. The two histories are the same history. They used the same tables.

It did not last, and it did not survive its own success. Rents rose through the 1960s, the cheap rooms went, the fashion houses came, and the cafés turned into monuments to what they had been. The Flore founded a literary prize. The Deux Magots founded one earlier. Both are excellent places to pay a great deal for a coffee and look at the chair where somebody sat.

The other life left too, and it left in stages: to the rue Sainte-Anne near the Opéra in the 1970s, to Les Halles in the 1980s, and finally to Le Marais, where it still is. Nothing on these streets records that it was ever here. The plaques are for the philosophers.