|
Take a right on to rue Bonaparte, passing an imaginative piece of street sculpture that looks like a burst water main. Follow boutique-flanked rue Bonaparte up to St-Sulpice and then go left along rue St-Sulpice. This is an unusually arid stretch for refreshment of any kind, but relief is at hand if you can make it to the carrefour de l’Odéon. This is a popular gathering spot, and the Horse’s Tavern has a quite un-Parisian bias towards beer, boasting twelve different brands on draught and 180 in bottle. Personally I would keep going up the attractive rue de l’Odéon until you come to the Bar Dix, a small, dark, friendly dive that serves jugs of sangria and is right next door to the original premises of Shakespeare & Company.
Joyce’s "Ulysses" was first published from here, Henry Miller borrowed books from here and never brought them back, and Hemingway smashed a vase of flowers here after reading a particularly bad review. It’s now a Chinese import business.
At the end of the street is a superb fish restaurant, La Méditerranée, part of a small crescent of buildings that faces the elegant columned portals of the Odéon, Théatre de l’Europe. The fact that there is a theatre in the center of Paris committed to productions from all over the Continent, let alone one as prestigious as this, shows how natural and unselfconscious is the French relationship with Europe. And a stroll beneath the columns at the front of the theatre, looking back the way you’ve come, offers a wonderful tracking shot of St-Germain. Take a right down rue de Vaugirard, past the gendarmes in their plastic boxes outside the Senate, and into a narrow lane called rue Férou. No.6 is an imposing building with stucco swags and medallions and a courtyard with gates guarded by a pair of sphinxes. This was Hemingway’s last apartment in Paris and a greater contrast with the cold-water, outside-lavatory flatlet on Cardinal-Lemoine could hardly be imagined. But by that time, Hemingway’s bohemian days were over. After four years in Paris he had established himself with a hit novel — "The Sun Also Rises" — and a second and much richer wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.
Throughout the whole seven years he lived in Paris his favorite refuge was the incomparable Jardin du Luxembourg, a 60-acre park laid out in the early seventeenth century, which never intrudes upon or overwhelms the area around it. It is the city park par excellence, big enough to offer corners of peace and quiet, small enough to walk across in a matter of minutes. It connects what can loosely be called the Left Bank with Montparnasse.
As you walk in off the busy rue de Vaugirard you enter a serene and calming world created by a series of artfully constructed vistas. Immaculately trained avenues lead to low, dark, miniature forests of precision-planted limes and chestnuts reminiscent of the backgrounds of Bellini and Uccello paintings in which awful things go on. These in turn give way to wide, open terraces looking out over the elegant pond and the Palais du Luxembourg. The gardens are dotted with nineteenth-century park furniture, little pavilions and shelters, all beautifully kept.
Hemingway talks often of the Jardin. He walked here with Hadley and their first son Jack, he loved to look at the Cezannes in the Musée de Luxembourg (now closed and the paintings moved to the Musée d’Orsay), and he came through here when he was very poor because "you saw and smelled nothing to eat from the place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard." And, above all, he came through here on his way to visit his greatest single artistic influence in Paris, Gertrude Stein.
As the park has so little changed you can be pretty certain that if you make your way along the fresh-swept gravel paths, out of the middle gate on to rue Guynemer and across to rue de Fleurus you will be seeing pretty much what Hemingway saw as he made his way along to Stein’s apartment at No.27. "It was easy to get into the habit of stopping in at 27 rue de Fleurus for warmth and the great pictures and the conversation," he wrote. Stein introduced him to writers and artists, and to new ideas about painting and writing. She and her friend Alice B. Toklas served them liqueurs made from plums and raspberries. They fell out eventually and called each other names, but Hemingway did that with most people who helped him.
The apartment blocks on rue de Fleurus are big, bland, expensive and dull, and we should move rapidly to boulevard Raspail, left and then left again on to rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Ezra Pound, the poet, lived at No.70 and it was here he introduced Hemingway to one of his first publishers, Ernest Walsh. Hemingway, in turn, taught Pound to box. "He has the general grace of the crayfish," he wrote to a friend.
In 1924 Hemingway moved to an apartment at No.113, above a sawmill (which was why it was cheap). Nowadays the concrete-coated block is part of the Ecole Alsacienne. Much of the area is home to schools and colleges, and if you want to see the France of the future, turn up there about midday when the cafés are full of students and try to squeeze into the Avant-Scène bar. Opposite Hemingway’s apartment there was a bakery and Hemingway remembers going "into the back door that fronted on to the boulevard Montparnasse and out through the good bread smells of the ovens and the shop to the street." If you look carefully you’ll find a short steep stairway that still leads to a boulangerie and patisserie and still smells so good that you may be tempted to buy one of their sensational filled baguettes, give up the walk and go back for a picnic in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
But we’re almost there. The front door of the Patisserie Grascoeur opens on to the boulevard du Montparnasse and a final massed climax of Hemingway sites. Turn left for Librairie Abencerage at No.159, an upmarket travel bookshop that was once the Hôtel Venitia, where Hemingway carried on an adulterous affair with Pauline (who became the second Mrs. Hemingway in 1927). Carry on to the junction of rue de l’Observatoire where you will find La Closerie des Lilas, one of Hemingway’s favorite writing, eating and drinking spots. He became disillusioned with it when it went upmarket in 1925. He was particularly appalled that the waiter was forced to shave off his moustache. The American Bar they opened then is still there and you can sit and have a cocktail named after him beside a brass plaque with his name on. Or sit at the front and look out past the statue of Marshal Ney flourishing his sword and see beyond it, across the road, the sign of the Hôtel Beauvoir, where Hadley Hemingway and their young son stayed after Hemingway left her for Pauline, and Paris began to turn sour for all of them.
"Paris was never to be the same again, although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed," he wrote of the break-up. La Closerie des Lilas (with its own chapter in "A Moveable Feast") is a convenient place to stop, but if you would like a cheaper restaurant and a more collectable Métro station at which to finish, then turn right out of the Closerie and follow the boulevard du Montparnasse to place Vavin. Here you have a choice of classic brasseries, all well known to Hemingway — La Rotonde, Le Dôme, La Coupole, Le Select. Pass them by for now and turn off the main road up rue Delambre, where you will find the site of the fabulously named Dingo Bar. It’s now called the Auberge de Venise, and the cooking is Italian, but surely that’s a small price to pay for eating on the spot where Hemingway first met Scott Fitzgerald and the two English aristocrats on whom he based the characters of Duff Twysden and Mike Guthrie in "The Sun Also Rises," the book that made Hemingway, and Hemingway’s Paris, famous.
We’ve covered the ground the way Hemingway liked to do it. On foot. I may be wrong but I can’t remember him mentioning a single Métro station — even the one at the end of the rue Delambre and at the end of our walk.
|
