Inspiration at the bottom of the bottle: where the literary legends drank in Paris
“All Paris belongs to me, and I belong to this notebook and pencil,” Ernest Hemingway wrote, sitting in an unknown location that he called simply “a good café on the Place St-Michel”. Rivalling its reputation as the city of love, Paris is also the city of literature. In bars across the city, great works were formed, and great minds merged.
As the home of the Lost Generation, Paris in the 1920s was bustling with the best writers the world had to offer. Just like you and your friends get together in the pub and share gossip and woes over a few drinks, the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein were doing the same.
In his memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway maps the city through a series of anecdotes as the writers worried about money, read each other’s drafts and drank cheap wine in a place that felt set up just for them. The cafés and bars opened their doors to let the writers pass hours and hours over one whiskey, scribbling on their notepads. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company wasn’t yet a tourist attraction but was a working refuge, allowing writers to borrow books and money, propping them up mentally and financially while they created masterpieces.
Walking through the city today, all the ghosts are still there. Whether buried in Montparnasse or Pere Lachaise cemeteries, honoured with plaques on the streets they used to live on, or simply remembered by the places they used to haunt, the literary greats are constantly watching over the place.
If you’re a writer, there is no better place to be. Walkable and relatively cheap as far as capital cities are concerned, Paris is a place to take a book and a notepad and spend long, leisurely hours poring over ideas at roadside tables. It’s a place to pay your respects to the literary legends and then spend your time becoming the next generation of them. With beautiful architecture, the best museums and miles of history, there is plenty of inspiration to be found. But if you need a boost, find it in the bottom of a bottle at one of the watering holes frequented by writers in the city.
Rosebud
Where: 11 Rue Delambre, 75014 Paris
At 9pm on a Saturday night, I wandered to the Rosebud. Sat on a quieter side street in Montparnasse, close by to the cemetery where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir’s lipstick-stained grave lies, their spirits are still in here sipping a sidecar and listening to the jazz. Settled into a corner seat amidst the decore that feels unchanged since the 1930s, I can feel them sit down next to me and help me pick up the pen.
Small and quiet, laid out for evenings spent flirting, reading or writing, the Rosebud is the perfect romantic bar. With a menu full of classic cocktails and whiskeys, it’s a place to escape the world and step into a calmer one.
Auberge de Venise / Dingo Bar
Where: 10 Rue Delambre, 75014 Paris
Another notable spot is directly across the road from Rosebud. While it’s now an Italian restaurant, no amount of reupholstering can shake ghosts this lofty.
“The first time I met Scott Fitzgerald, a very strange thing happened,” Hemingway begins. “He had come into the Dingto Bar in the rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters…” Recounting his introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, among other American classics, the pair shared champagne at the bar. The two “worthless characters” were British aristocrats who would later inspire the characters of Duff Twysden and Mike Guthrie in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
As for Fitzgerald, the pair became fast and strange friends, with Hemingway recognising his talent as both a curse and a gift. After reading Gatsby and after that first meeting, he wrote, “When I finished the book, I knew that no matter what Scott did, not how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend.” So, while the bar might be different, it’s still a place to toast to friendship.
La Closerie des Lilas
Where: 171 Bd du Montparnasse, 75006 Paris
“I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème, and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote.” Sat on the corner in the 14th Arrondissement, close to his first Parisian apartment on Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Hemingway’s life in the city rotated around La Closierie des Lilas. It was where he wrote, where he socialised, where he joined his fellow writers to celebrate the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses with Sylvia Beach and the writer himself.
Throughout the glory years of writers in Paris, the Lilas was a home for the lost generation as they befriended the waiters and each other. Names like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and more all wandered in and out of its doors, drinking a fine a l’eau or a brandy. With such a tight literary history, the place, which is more of a fancy restaurant today, honoured its legacy with its own literary prize.
Les Deux Magots
Where: 6 Pl. Saint-Germain des Prés, 75006 Paris
Today, Les Deux Magots is a major tourist hotspot. On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Les Deux Magots sits next to Cafe De Flore as two key places with tight literary legacies. Dating back even beyond the Lost Generation of the 1920s, French classical masters like Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine would have been found there. From the intellectuals to the masters of symbolism, through to the modern greats like Albert Camus, artists like Picasso and American exports like James Baldwin and Hemingway, the café seats are worn with history.
Referenced in countless works of literature, the café is a go-to place for artistic types visiting the city. If you’re looking for a quiet spot to set up and write with literary ghosts looking over your shoulder, Les Deux Magots and Cafe De Flore are probably too busy for any focus. But once the work is done, head there for a drink to soothe a racing mind and return to the present world.
