Setting of the story
The Sun Also Rises
Crowded, smoky, and loud — the Montmartre boîte where the Paris nights end, the music hitting you at the door.
Zelli's
Rebuilt on the site
Outside only
A mini-market
Crowded, smoky, and loud — Joe Zelli's Montmartre boîte, where the music hits you at the door and the novel's Paris nights go to end.
- 16 bis Rue Fontaine (now Rue Pierre-Fontaine), 75009 Paris
Artistic reconstruction
The place, briefly
When the Montparnasse cafés finally closed their terraces, the night moved up the hill. Lower Montmartre between Pigalle and the rue Fontaine was the after-midnight quarter of the American twenties — jazz bands, champagne in buckets, francs evaporating — and its flagship was Zelli's, the club Joe Zelli ran on the rue Fontaine. It was the name you dropped to show you knew where the night actually went: memoirs of the decade treat 'Zelli's' the way they treat 'the Ritz,' as a word needing no explanation.
The novel gives it exactly that treatment, twice. The Sun Also Rises' Lady Brett Ashley tosses the name off in passing — hampers and a dozen bottles of Mumm's, all got at Zelli's — and later the crowd goes up to Montmartre and inside: packed, smoky, the music hitting you as you come through the door, a floor too crowded to really dance on, and the drummer waving hello. It is the loudest room in a novel that otherwise runs on café murmur, and Hemingway spends it in a page and a half.
Zelli's belonged to the dollar decade and did not outlive it. The crash emptied Montmartre's American nightlife within a couple of seasons, the club faded with the rest, and the street was later renamed rue Pierre-Fontaine. Nothing marks the address; the novel is the plaque.
In their words
Finally we went up to Montmartre. Inside Zelli’s it was crowded, smoky, and noisy. The music hit you as you went in.
Key facts
- The flagship nightclub of Anglo-American Montmartre
- Joe Zelli, the best-known night-trade host of twenties Paris
- Rue Fontaine, below Pigalle
- The crowded, smoky end of the Paris nights — and the source of the count's champagne
- Gone — the street is now the rue Pierre-Fontaine
In images
Timeline
Joe Zelli opens on the rue Fontaine; lower Montmartre becomes the after-hours quarter of the American colony.
The most famous nightclub name in expatriate Paris.
Hemingway takes the crowd of The Sun Also Rises up the hill and through the door.
The crash empties the dollar nightlife; Zelli's fades with it.
No trace at the address; the novel keeps the name current.
On the map
Related books
Writers who knew this place
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway wrote about Zelli's in The Sun Also Rises.
Within walking distance
Hotel Liseux and Café Liseux
The surviving Pigalle corner where the vanished Café Liseux and Hotel Liseux stood, and where Langston Hughes lodged during his 1937 and 1938 returns to Paris.
Visit the place
Le Grand Duc
The tiny Montmartre nightclub where Langston Hughes washed dishes in 1924 and Bricktop began her Paris career — an eight-foot bar, a dance floor for a dozen couples, and the after-hours jam sessions that ended the quarter's nights.
Visit the place
The Flea Pit
The vanished café at the La Bruyère and Pigalle corner where Black musicians and performers gathered, and where Langston Hughes watched Sonya hide beneath their table.
Visit the place
Pigalle
The strip along the boulevard de Clichy below Montmartre, where the studios and the cabarets shared a pavement until only the second kind was left.
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.