Literary Paris
Sara Parrot
Paris is a city replete with literary treasures. In it, one can walk in the footsteps of post-Napoleonic writers Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, or imagine the lives of the American ex-pat authors who came to the French capital in the 1920s, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. For the literary-minded traveler, this is a sampling of just some of Paris’s many writerly delights.
One of the first-floor dining rooms at Le Procope, which has served food and beverages to the author Voltaire, the poet Paul Verlaine, and other French literati from the seventeenth century to today. Photograph by Madrigalit
Le Procope
Touted as the oldest restaurant in Paris, Le Procope first opened its doors in 1686 and has, since that time, welcomed various literary luminaries into its salons, which are, today, still decorated in an 18th-century style, with crystal chandeliers dangling overhead and mirrors and paintings hanging on its red-painted walls. In the 1700s, the café served as a meeting place for writers of the Enlightenment, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, the latter of whom was purported to consume more than forty cups of coffee—a new delicacy in French brasseries of the time—in a single day, usually laced with chocolate. It is also believed that conversations in the café between Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert formed the first concepts for the nineteen-volume Encyclopédie, a rigorous Enlightenment-era publication intended to spread knowledge to the French public.
“The Café de Procope . . . also called the Antre (cavern) de Procope, because it was very dark, even in full day, and ill-lighted in the evenings; and because you often saw there a set of lank, sallow poets, who had somewhat the air of apparitions.”
—Thomas Carlyle, writing about Le Procope in 1829
In the nineteenth century, writers Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo also visited the café, and a small photograph of the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine seated at one of the tables hangs in the foyer of the restaurant today. Along with delighting in the literary spirits that fill this charming eatery, a contemporary visitor can also enjoy a delicious French meal, including such traditional items as coq au vin, foie gras, and pâté en croute, alongside a selection of wines from regions across France.
The gravestone of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, covered in hearts and kisses, at the Montparnasse Cemetery. Photograph by Madrigalit
Montparnasse Cemetery
The Montparnasse Cemetery, the second largest in Paris, is filled with uniquely rendered graves and monuments for numerous persons of import, including many famous writers, such as the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, the Argentine French author Julio Cortázar, the American writer and critic Susan Sontag, and the French writer and screenwriter Marguerite Duras—Duras’s grave is marked with a pot filled with pens offered by her devotees. The tombstone of the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, also in this cemetery, is today decorated with the lipstick hearts and kisses of their many fans.
A brief history of La Maison de Verlaine on the wall outside the restaurant. Photograph by Madrigalit
La Maison de Verlaine
In the vicinity of the Montparnasse Cemetery is the small café La Maison de Verlaine, which features stone walls, wood-beamed ceilings, and a quintessentially French menu, including such items as steak tartare, escargots, and duck liver pâté. This cozy restaurant is named after the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine who once resided at the address. The American novelist Ernest Hemingway also lived at this spot, and it is where he wrote his memoir on Paris, A Moveable Feast.
Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, “Le Bateau Ivre” written on the side of a building on Rue Férou. Photograph by Madrigalit
Rue Férou
Possibly one of the most unexpected and lovely of literary moments in all of Paris is to stumble upon Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Le Bateau Ivre” (The Drunken Boat) on the side of an otherwise plain building on Rue Férou, not far from the Pantheon and the Church of Saint-Sulpice. The complete text—all one hundred lines of it—has been hand-painted by the calligrapher Jan Willem Bruins as a part of the European “Poems on Walls” project. Uniquely, the columns of the poem on the wall read from right to left, rather than in the traditional Western form of left to right. The explanation for this typographical treatment is that the words of the poem were carried to the wall by the wind, when the teenaged Rimbaud first recited its lines in a nearby café around 1871.
The front of Shakespeare and Company. Photograph by Madrigalit
Shakespeare and Company
When describing “Literary Paris” to an anglophone audience, it is impossible not to mention the small English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank, which was founded in 1951 and has, since that time, been not just a seller of books but a gathering spot for some of the great writers in the twentieth century, from “Lost Generation” writers like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, to later luminaries such as James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, and Richard Wright. And, for many years, writers or the writerly-minded have been permitted to spend nights in the shop for free, sleeping amid the rambling shelves of books.
“I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter, and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations.”
— George Whitman, founder of Shakespeare and Company
This store, originally founded under the name Le Mistral by American ex-pat George Whitman, was in many ways inspired by the first Shakespeare and Company shop in another location in Paris, run by the bookseller, publisher, and writer, Sylvia Beach—in fact, Whitman honored Beach when she died by applying her bookstore’s name to his own. Beach was the first to publish James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, and in that book, Joyce mentions the bookstore: “Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.” The quote is inscribed on the bookstore’s website today, underlining just how important Shakespeare and Company—in all of its iterations—has been in the making of modern literary history. Since its original founding as a single space on the first floor, the shop has expanded to include multiple rooms, a next-door café, a publishing company, and assorted literary offerings, including readings, a festival, and a podcast series.
The front of the bookstore, publisher, and gallery Ofr. Paris. Photograph by Madrigalit
Ofr. Paris
For those who want more of a distinctly French twist added to their bibliophile tendencies, the indie French bookstore, publisher, and gallery Ofr. Paris is an eclectic shop filled with books focused on the subjects of architecture, art, design, fashion, and photography, alongside chic stationery items and a modest line of apparel. It also features a gallery in its back room and hosts impromptu concerts and block parties. Described by MKRS. Paris as “a drop-in center for the city’s artists and dreamers,” Ofr. Paris is an incredibly special venue for any itinerary of current literary hotspots in the capital.
The writer Marcel Proust’s bedroom furniture in the Musée Carnavalet. Photograph by Madrigalit
Musée Carnavalet
Following recent years of renovation, the Musée Carnavalet is open to the public again, sharing the more than three thousand works in its collection that, in many ways, are compiled to resemble an artful attic of the city of Paris, thoughtfully blending objects and memory. In the museum you can find a sculpted head from the city’s ancient Roman amphitheater dating to the second or third century; Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier’s painting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the National Assembly’s text of 1789, proclaiming freedom and equal rights for all citizens; and the original “Chat Noir” cabaret sign. Paris’s literary traditions are not forgotten in this wondrous mélange. In the galleries, a visitor can find Madame de Sévigné’s desk, Voltaire’s armchair, Émile Zola’s watch, Charles Baudelaire’s walking stick, Gertrude Stein’s office furniture, and more. The new Carnavalet also offers a pretty garden café, where aspiring writers can spend time with their notebooks open, drinking cups of coffee or tea at the many little tables amid the flowers.
A copy of Honoré de Balzac’s marked-up printer’s proof for his book La Veille Fille, in the Maison de Balzac. Photograph by Madrigalit
Maison de Balzac
The Maison de Balzac is the house-turned-museum where Honoré de Balzac lived from 1840 to 1847, and where he revised copy from his masterpiece La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy) and wrote other stories. The only surviving Paris home of the writer, it is largely devoted to his multi-volume magnum opus of interconnected stories of post-Napoleonic French society. The small apartment features various printer’s proofs with the novelist’s inked annotations and the study—with Balzac’s writing table, armchair, and library—where he made his obsessive revisions.
“This is why I must have a quiet house between a courtyard and a garden, well decorated, because it is my nest, my shell, the safety wrapping of my life!”
—Honoré de Balzac, written in a letter from 1844
There is also a gallery filled with the many characters from his grand tale, in the forms of small printer’s woodblocks used to illustrate the various editions of Balzac’s works. These blocks line the walls in neatly stacked rows, giving a taste not just of literary history, but of publishing history as well—end-grain wood engraving was introduced in the early 19th century and enabled a book’s illustrations to be printed at the same time as its text. Tucked in the Passy neighborhood on the western side of Paris, this museum is a quick Métro ride from the city center, and worth the journey for both its offerings, including a nice café in the author’s former garden, and its pleasant surroundings, where one can easily stroll, taking in views of the Eiffel Tower—a feature added to the nearby landscape just after Balzac’s time.
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