A Moveable Feast: Hemingway's Paris Years

Hemingway and his wife Hadley lived in a small walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, in the Latin Quarter, and he rented a room nearby to write in. The memoir mentions the Place de la Contrescarpe, just around the corner. A plaque on the façade carries a sentence from the book: this was the Paris of their youth, when they were very poor and very happy. The flat itself is a private home, so this is a stop for the street and the plaque.

Further along, where the rue Descartes runs on from the rue Mouffetard, stands the building at number 39 where the poet Paul Verlaine died in 1896. In the memoir he rents a room near the flat to write in, and he claimed it was here, in a building with a literary past; which room was his is not recorded. The memoir also places him at the Café des Amateurs on the rue Mouffetard.

Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus is where Hemingway sought a mentor: he began as her close friend and admirer, then they grew apart. The memoir gives her chapters, including "Miss Stein Instructs" and "Une Génération Perdue", and in it Hemingway writes that Stein heard the phrase "lost generation" from a French garage owner who serviced her car. Visiting Stein, Hemingway stopped at the nearby Musée du Luxembourg to see the Impressionists, still hanging there in 1921. Stein and Toklas moved to rue Christine in 1938.

Sylvia Beach's English-language bookstore and lending library stood at 12 rue de l'Odéon from May 1921, and the memoir keeps coming back to it: customers could buy or borrow books, even Lady Chatterley's Lover, banned in England and the United States. Hemingway met Ezra Pound there by chance in 1922, and Beach sold copies of his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. The shop closed in 1941; today's Shakespeare and Company, on rue de la Bûcherie, is George Whitman's, named in her honour.

Visitor guidance: Number 12 is no longer a bookshop; the Shakespeare and Company open today is at 37 rue de la Bûcherie.

One night in 1923 Hemingway met the painter Pascin at Le Dôme for drinks, with two of Pascin's young models at the table. The chapter "With Pascin at the Dôme" closes on a later sadness: after Pascin hanged himself in 1930, Hemingway wrote, he liked to remember him as he was that night. The Dôme, on the boulevard du Montparnasse, became the gathering place of the American literary colony, and is now a top fish restaurant.

Visitor guidance: Le Dôme is at 108 boulevard du Montparnasse.

The Closerie des Lilas, opened in 1847 by François Bullier as a simple brasserie, owes much of its fame to Hemingway, who wrote short stories and articles for the Toronto Star there. The memoir gives it a chapter, "Evan Shipman at the Lilas", and mentions Paul Fort among its customers. It still stands on the boulevard du Montparnasse as a restaurant.

Visitor guidance: The Closerie des Lilas is on the boulevard du Montparnasse.

Brasserie Lipp, at 151 boulevard Saint-Germain, is featured prominently in the memoir and was a place Hemingway frequented in the 1920s. Léonard Lipp and his wife Pétronille opened it in 1880, serving cervelat rémoulade and choucroute garnie with the finest beers. In July 1920 Marcellin Cazes redesigned it, decorating it with tiled murals, painted ceilings and purple moleskin seating.

Visitor guidance: Lipp is a brasserie at 151 boulevard Saint-Germain.

The memoir exists because of luggage. In March 1928 Hemingway left two small steamer trunks of notebooks in the basement of the Ritz; in November 1956 he got them back, lined notebooks like those Paris schoolchildren used in the 1920s. He had them transcribed and began turning them into a book, which his widow Mary published in 1964, three years after his suicide. His own preface says it may be taken as a work of imagination. The Ritz overlooks the Place Vendôme and has a bar named for him.

Visitor guidance: The Ritz overlooks the Place Vendôme; its Bar Hemingway is named for the writer.