Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [110]
1 James Joyce’s flat Begin your tour at the Cardinal Lemoine metro station, where rue du Cardinal Lemoine meets rue Monge, 5e. Walk southwest along rue du Cardinal Lemoine, peering down the passageway at No 71, which may or may not be closed off. The Irish writer James Joyce (1882–1941) lived in the courtyard flat at the back marked ‘E’ when he first arrived in Paris in 1921, and it was here that he finished editing Ulysses.
2 Ernest Hemingway’s apartment Further south at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine is the 3rd-floor apartment where Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) lived with his first wife Hadley from January 1922 until August 1923. The flat figures prominently in his book of memoirs, A Moveable Feast, from which the quotation on the wall plaque (in French) is taken: ‘This is how Paris was in our youth when we were very poor and very happy.’ Just below the flat was the Bal au Printemps, a popular bal musette (dancing club), which served as the model for the one where Jake Barnes met Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It is now the bookshop Librairie Les Alizés (The Trade Winds; 01 43 25 20 03; 10am-12.30pm & 1.30-9pm Tue-Fri, 10am-12.30pm & 1.30-7pm Mon & Sat, 2-7pm Sun), specialising in new and secondhand books by American writers.
3 Paul Verlaine’s garret Hemingway lived on rue du Cardinal Lemoine, but he wrote in a top-floor garret of a hotel round the corner at 39 rue Descartes, the very hotel where the poet Paul Verlaine (1844–96) had died less than three decades before. The plaque, on what is now a restaurant aptly called La Maison de Verlaine, incorrectly states that Hemingway lived here from 1921 to 1925. Japanese historical novelist Kunio Tsuji lived here from 1980 to 1999.
4 Place de la Contrescarpe Rue Descartes runs south into place de la Contrescarpe, now a well-scrubbed square with four Judas trees and a fountain, but once a ‘cesspool’ (or so Hemingway said), especially the Café des Amateurs at No 2–4, which is now the popular Café Delmas. The Au Nègre Joyeux, above a small supermarket at No 12, which sports a large painting of a jolly black servant and his white master, was another popular music club in the early 20th century.
5 George Orwell’s boarding house Rue Mouffetard (from mofette, meaning ‘skunk’) runs south of place de la Contrescarpe. Turn west (right) at the first street on the right (pedestrian rue du Pot de Fer); in 1928 one Eric Blair – better known to the world as George Orwell (1903–50) – stayed in a cheap and dirty boarding house above 6 rue du Pot de Fer called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux (Hotel of the Three Sparrows) while working as a dishwasher. He wrote all about it and the street, which he called ‘rue du Coq d’Or’ (Street of the Golden Rooster), in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
6 Place du Panthéon Turn north (right) onto rue Tournefort (the street where much of Balzac’s novel Père Goriot takes place) and go left into rue de l’Estrapade. From here follow Hemingway’s own directions provided in A Moveable Feast as he made his way to a favourite café in place St-Michel. Turn north (right) onto rue Clotilde and walk the length of the street – the eastern side of vast place du Panthéon no less – to the corner of rue Clovis. Just around the corner on rue Clovis is the entrance to the prestigious Lycée Henri IV; cross the road to glimpse the tip of the 13th-century (but heavily restored) Tour Clovis within the school complex; the tower is all that remains of an abbey founded by Clovis I. Opposite is the ancient Église St-Étienne du Mont.
7 Boulevard St-Michel Continue around the northern edge of place du Panthéon and walk west along rue Soufflot, past the bounty of bookshops that line both sides of the street. Turn right onto blvd St-Michel and follow it past Hôtel