Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [111]
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WALK FACTS
Start Metro Cardinal Lemoine
End Former Dingo Bar (Metro Vavin)
Distance 7km
Time Three hours
Fuel stops Les Deux Magots or Café de Flore
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8 Jack Kerouac’s hotel Follow the Seine west along quai des Grands Augustins. Hemingway used to buy books from the bouquinistes (secondhand booksellers), some of whom still line the embankment. To the south, at No 9 of tiny rue Gît le Cœur, is the Relais Hôtel du Vieux Paris, a favourite of poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–97) and Beat writer Jack Kerouac (1922–69) in the 1950s. (There’s a not-wholly-substantiated story that when Truman Capote first read Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness On the Road he exclaimed, ‘That’s not writing – that’s typewriting!’) Ginsberg and Kerouac drank just down the road in a bar called Le Gentilhomme at 28 rue St-André des Arts, now an Irish pub called Corcoran’s.
9 Picasso’s studio Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) had his studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins, the street that runs south from quai des Grands Augustins. Picasso lived here from 1936 to 1955 and completed his masterpiece Guernica here in 1937 – exactly a century after Balzac’s Le Chef d’Œuvre Inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), set in this hôtel particulier, was published.
10 Shakespeare & Company – The Original Walk south to rue St-André des Arts, follow it westwards and then turn south through Cour du Commerce Saint André, a covered passage that empties into blvd St-Germain opposite the statue of Georges Danton. At 12 rue de l’Odéon, the street running south, stood the original Shakespeare & Company bookshop, where founder-owner Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) lent books to Hemingway, and edited, retyped and published Ulysses for Joyce in 1922. The bookshop was closed during the occupation when Beach refused to sell her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake to a Nazi officer.
11 Sartre & de Beauvoir’s hang-outs Return to blvd St-Germain and walk westwards to the 11th-century Église St-Germain des Prés. Opposite is Les Deux Magots and beyond it Café de Flore, favourite hang-outs of post-war Left Bank intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) and good (though pricey) places to stop for a snack or a drink.
12 Henry Miller’s room From place St-Germain des Prés walk north along rue Bonaparte. In spring 1930 Henry Miller (1891–1980) stayed in a 5th-floor mansard room in Hôtel St-Germain des Prés at No 36 and later wrote about the experience in Letters to Emil (1989). The philosopher Auguste Comté (1798–1857), the founder of positivism, lived in the same building from 1818 to 1822. A few doors down at No 30 is the Bistrot Le Pré aux Clercs, another Hemingway hang-out.
13 Oscar Wilde’s hotel Continue north on rue Bonaparte and turn east onto rue des Beaux-Arts. Walk to No 13 and you’ll reach what is now L’Hôtel, the former Hôtel d’Alsace, where Oscar Wilde (b 1854) died of meningitis in 1900. But not before proclaiming, in his typical style, that he and the wallpaper of his room were ‘fighting a duel to the death’ (boxed text). The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) also stayed in the same hotel many times in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
14 Rue Jacob This street running perpendicular to rue Bonaparte has literary associations from the sublime to the ridiculous. At No 44, Hôtel d’Angleterre is where Hemingway spent his first night in Paris (in room No 14 on 20 December 1921). A few doors down at No 56, the former Hôtel d’York is of great historic, if not literary, significance – this is where David Hartley, George III’s representative, met with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Hay on 3 September 1783 to sign the treaty recognising American independence.
At 52 rue Jacob is a nondescript