Mention the literary cafés of Paris and people often think of Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore, located in the Saint Germain district of the Left Bank. Less known, however, are the literary cafés of Montparnasse. From 1900 to 1939, this neighborhood was filled with writers and artists from all over the world; his ideas were to profoundly influence the artistic and literary expression of the 20th century.
The Carrefour Vavin, the crossroads of boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail, has been the center of café life in the neighborhood since Le Dôme opened its doors in 1898. Subsequently, three neighboring cafés – La Rotonde (1911), Le Select ( 1925) and La Coupole (1927) opened to compete with the Dome. Several smaller cafes and bars also opened in the side streets to provide additional drinking and socializing settings.
Artists dominated Montparnasse, but writers and publishers also abounded: Hemingway, Lewis, Miller, and many others frequented the terraces of Carrefour Vavin cafes. Women writers were also a vibrant component of this café society, but many of them remain less well known. Some of their stories, as well as those of the cafes they frequented, are recounted below.
A few meters up the rue Delambre, a small street that leads south from the Carrefour Vavin, is the Auberge de Venise restaurant at number 10. Previously, this was the Dingo Bar, an establishment founded in 1923. The Dingo attracted to a wealthy Anglo-American clientele. ; Hemingway and Fitzgerald met there for the first time.
The American writer Djuna Barnes went there often, as she was a great friend of Dingo’s bartender, the legendary Jimmie Charters. She moved to Paris from Greenwich Village, where she had started a career as a journalist. She eventually produced works in all literary genres, including plays. Barnes became part of the literary crowd that frequented Natalie Barney’s literary salon in Saint Germain des Prés, and was honored by Barney’s Académie des Femmes (conceived as the counterpart of France’s all-male Académie Française). She was based on one of the characters from her novel. night forest into a talkative American doctor whom he met at the Dingo.
Nancy Cunard, a wealthy British socialite and ardent supporter of Surrealism, was also a frequent customer of the Dingo. Cunard owned Hours Press, one of the small publishers that marked the Anglophone literary terrain of pre-World War II Paris.
4 rue Delambre was once the address of the Black Manikin Press, run by Edward W. Titus. This was another of the small English-language printing presses that operated in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. published titus ladies almanac (1926) by Djuna Barnes and DH Lawrence, an unprofessional studio (1932) by Anaïs Nin, the infamous lover and champion of Henry Miller.
Le Dôme, the oldest of the Carrefour Vavin cafés, is located on the corner of boulevard du Montparnasse and rue Delambre. Once a shabby little place, the cafe was completely renovated and the terrace was added to the boulevard in 1923. In 1928, the owner added an “American Bar,” an attractive feature for American tourists subject to Prohibition in home. Le Dôme drew a well-heeled American and German crowd, while Eastern Europeans (many of whom were Jewish), South Americans, Russians, Scandinavians, and other foreigners preferred the cafe just across the boulevard, La Roundabout.
Gertrude Stein frequented the Dome at the turn of the 20th century. It was here that, in 1907, she supposedly convinced Henri Matisse to open an academy for artists. Matisse would later contribute to “Testimony Against Gertrude Stein” (1935), a document protesting Stein’s content. Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).
The Dome has now become exclusive. The restaurant is famous for its seafood, with fresh oysters and other fish arriving daily from the Brittany coast. Its walls are covered with photographs of its most famous patrons, including those of the Lost Generation of the 1920s.
Montparnasse attracted so many foreigners in the early 20th century that it’s easy to forget that the French also contributed significantly to the fervor of the time. In particular, two French women figured prominently in the history of the neighborhood café. One was Kiki, an uneducated woman of modest means who became known as the queen of Montparnasse. The other was Simone de Beauvoir, an existentialist and feminist writer.
Originally from the Burgundy region of France, Kiki (given name Alice Prin) moved to Paris in 1913. She modeled nudes for many of the Ecole de Paris painters, and was also a lover to many of them. As La Rotonde was the favorite café for neighborhood artists, she Kiki became a frequent customer of the establishment. She was even allowed to wash there during her first years of poverty in Montparnasse.
Kiki is best known as the partner and muse of photographer Man Ray, who would immortalize her in photographs such as “Ingres’ violinand in the movie the starfish (Starfish). She met Man Ray at La Rotonde in 1921 and their passionate romance began almost immediately after their first meeting.
Kiki was a singer, painter and actress as well as a model. She published the memoirs of her- Memories: Kiki (Henri Broca, 1929) – at the age of 28. They are significant because they represent one of the first chronicles about Paris written during the time when the events described actually occurred. His book was published in English by Titus’ Black Manikin Press (kiki’s memories1930), but was banned by the United States government until the 1970s.
Simone de Beauvoir was born into a bourgeois family in the apartment building above La Rotonde, and lived there until she was 11 years old. She and her sister were regular customers there when they were teenagers. A prolific author, playwright, and intellectual, and winner of the Prix Goncourt (a coveted French literary honour) in 1954, her most important sociological work was the 1949 essay entitled “the second sex” (“The Second Sex”). De Beauvoir spent the last years of her life as an advocate for women’s rights, particularly abortion and contraception.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay visited Paris many times during the 1920s. Like Djuna Barnes, she was part of Natalie Barney’s literary circle and was honored by Barney’s Académie de Femmes. Millay patronized La Rotonde despite being generally avoided by Americans; she dined there often during the year 1922. According to her reports, she even used it as a mailing address for herself on occasion.
On the same side of the street as La Rotonde and one block away is Le Select. This café quickly became a favorite of the Lost Generation during the 1920s, although the owners, Monsieur and Madame Jalbert, were not very fond of it. The cafe was also favored by a lesbian crowd. Djuna Barnes and her lover Thelma Wood frequented the Select during the 1920s. In 1936, Simone de Beauvoir noted that she and (Jean-Paul) Sartre would go there and “sat among the short-haired lesbians, who wore ties and even monocles.” sometimes…”
Le Select was the first café on the boulevard to stay open all night. Americans reportedly appreciated the menu selection, which included Welsh Rarebit. It is the least written among the four cafes on the boulevard du Montparnasse.
Directly across the boulevard from Le Select is La Coupole, perhaps the most famous of Montparnasse’s cafes. Two former employees of the Dôme built it with the intention of creating a magnificent café that would outshine the Dôme. When completed, it was enormous, employing up to 450 people and seating 600. The interior was decorated with paintings by neighborhood artists (many of whom were students of Léger and Matisse) and topped with an art deco dome. Due to its history and decoration, it has been listed as a historical monument.
La Coupole became a favorite haunt of de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. When de Beauvoir suffered a serious illness in 1937 and convalesced in a nearby hotel, Sartre brought him a meal from La Coupole every day. De Beauvoir worked on his novel The guest (The Guest) there in 1940.
Montparnasse’s literary heyday began to decline in the mid-1920s and collapsed with the stock market crash of 1929. Although most of the male figures of the era left France at this time, many of the literary women Americans and British remained in Paris. Some even defied the Nazi occupation during World War II. But little is written about his patronage of Montparnasse’s cafes and bars during this time.
As for the literary women of France, Simone de Beauvoir remained faithful to the cafes of Montparnasse until World War II. With the arrival of the Germans (who especially appreciated Le Dôme), she began to frequent the cafés of Saint Germain des Prés. However, she returned to Montparnasse during the 1970s and made a standing appointment to have weekly lunch with Sartre at La Coupole on Sundays at 2 pm.
Instead, Kiki never left the neighborhood. she continued to be one Montparnassienne until his death in 1952.
