Literary Itinerary in PARIS
 

Hello Fello Fodors!

I am planning a trip for my boss to Paris January 25- January 31st. She is interested in visiting some literary 'hot spots' while she is there. Some of the places she is interested in visiting are: The homes and haunts of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, The Balzac Museum and the Victor Hugo Museum. She would also like to visit the Hermes Museum and Coco Chanel's apartment.

Does anyone know where any of these places are located and can anyone please tell me of other literary 'must see' places? Any helps, tips and/or comments will be GREATLY appreciated!

You might want to buy her Walks in Hemingway's Paris (http://www.amazon.com/Walks-Hemingwa...1991081&sr=8-1). It lists a number of places that are related to Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, etc. Although it's changed location, I'm sure she'll want to see Shakespeare and Co. bookstore on the left bank, across from Notre Dame. Balzac's house is located out in Passy (I describe it in this blog: http://clearedready.blogspot.com/201...in-balzac.html), and the Victor Hugo Museum is in the Place des Vosges in the Marais. She also might enjoy visiting the many literary giants buried in the various cemeteries, including Beckett, Sartre, and Baudelaire in Montparnasse Cemetery. If she's a Proust fan, she can visit his tomb in Pere Lachaise, along with Abelard and Heloise and Oscar Wilde (among many others).

Thank you for that information- going to check out book and your blog! :)

You're quite welcome. I'm an English professor who loves Paris, so I've visited most of those places.

Balzac's and Hugo's homes are very interesting and open to the public as museums run by the city (I believe both have free admission now). I used to go to school right down the street from Gertrude Stein's apt where she lived with Toklas, I passed it every day walking to school, there is a plaque on the outside but it's nothing impressive or much to see (at 27, rue de Fleurus in St Germain). You can't go in. At least if you go by these places, there are plaques on the outside saying a little about the person and the significance (ie, lived or died here, whatever), although they are in French.

Oscar Wilde died at 13, rue des Beaux-Arts in St Germain. That's a hotel, it's an expensive hotel named L'Hotel now. Used to be called Hotel de l'Alsace.

I guess you just want literary people -- Picasso lived at 5-7 rue des Grands Augustins for about 20 years and painted Guernica there. It is also the setting of a Balzac novel, The Unknown Masterpiece.

She might want to visit Pere Lachaise, a famous Paris cemetery in the NE area. Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde are buried there, as well as Proust and Balzac and Colette. Many other famous people, also. Now you don't mention Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but they are bured in Montparnasse cemetery and she lived nearby, actually, on rue Schoelcher. Sartre lived around St Germain des Pres metro stop as I recall, at least for a while.

I think finding a guidebook as suggested is a good idea. There is lots of info online if you read French. Such as this website http://www.parisrues.com/

YOu can just stick a name in the search box and it will find streets and even has photos of the plaques on the buildings, etc. For instance, stick in Joyce and you get info that he wrote Ulysses at 71, rue du Cardinal Lemoine, 75005, and that Hemingway lived practically right next door at 74. http://www.parisrues.com/rues05/pari...l-lemoine.html You also find that Sylvia Beach published Ulysses at 12, rue de l'Odeon

FennyFen11,
Funny that you should ask. I too am very interested in visiting those haunts when I return to Paris in late spring.


First, I would suggest that your boss see MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, the Woody Allen spoof on Paris in the 20s, very clever with good reviews. Also I have recently listened to the CD of Hemingway’s MOVEABLE FEAST which I reserved at the local library. Great read about Hemingway’s life and loves in Paris as a young man.

I plan to look into PARIS WALKS which features a stroll through Hemingway’s old haunts. The tour meets at 10:30 on Friday mornings at the Cardinal Lemone Metro. See website.


Of course, there are the iconic cafés frequented by Hemingway and other Paris literari from the 20s and beyond – the Café Flore and the Café Deux Magots on Boulevard Saint Germain. Touristy, perhaps, but I plan to check them out.


Even though your boss is interested in Paris of the 20s, I am recommending the new book THE GREATER JOURNEY: AMERICANS IN PARIS 1830-1900 by famed historian David McCullough. Now that is a volume to stir the imagination and make one want to fly to Paris immediately.


So much to see, so little time. The problem for all of us. Good luck…

Thanks guys! All this information is very helpful!

Christina, thanks so much for recommending parisrues.com. Just checked out the site – so much information with great pics! Also enjoyed “reading” it en francais since I am trying to polish up my French, at least in reading if not speaking.

During my next trip I plan to stay in the 6th and really walk a great deal so parisrues will be very helpful. Merci…

you're welcome, it really is a great site, isn't it? I just found it when googling and trying to make suggestions for this post.

You may also find the following useful -

<i>Paris</i>, by Mike Gerrard, in the Bloom's Literary Places Series,

<i>Paris; A Literary Companion</i>, by Ian Littlewood,

and

<i>Permanent Parisians; An Illustrated, Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris</i>, by Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall.

For another view of Gertrude Stein, Barbara Will's latest book <i>Unlikely Collaboration; Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma</i>

http://rorotoko.com/interview/201110...n_bernard_fay/

FennyFen11:

For a handy, informative, and wonderfully illustrated guide to Literary Paris, one that you could easily take with you on your trip, you might want to check out the website littlebookroom.com

This small publisher has such a book, called Literary Paris. I have two of their Paris books: Picasso's Paris: Walking Tours of the Artist's Life in the City, and The Impressionists' Paris: Walking Tours of the Artist's Studios, Homes, and the Sites They Painted, both by Ellen Williams. I got these in 2000. I don't see them on their website, but they are still available through Amazon for around $13 each. These 5" x 7" 100-to-150 page guides include full-color reproductions, period cafe and restaurant listings, maps, and archival photographs.

The publisher has many other similar guides to Paris about other facets of city, as well as guides for Italy and the U.S.

This is a website that I bookmarked about walking tours relating to American writers:

http://www.washburn.edu/reference/awp/

“For another view of Gertrude Stein, Barbara Will's latest book Unlikely Collaboration; Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma”


Farrermog, thank you for the above suggestion. I am fascinated by every aspect of the German occupation of France during WWII. So many of the intellectual/artistic/literary elite thought that they were beyond the reach of the Nazi master plan. Many died in the Holocaust a la Irene Nemirovsky of SUITE FRANCAISE fame – love that book!

I have recently read THE BIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein which does not preview Stein’s collaboration sympathies. Anxious to read UNLIKELY COLLABORATION.

CW, also appreciated your sharing the website identifying the addresses of so many American ex-patriot American literari. I will try to do homage to as many as possible.

Merci beaucoup to all for your suggestions ….

Here is an excerpt from a trip report from a few years past with a decidely different result than others:

Day Whatever It Is

I was unsure where to eat near Ste. Germaine. I wanted to go to Le Procope and since I hadn’t been there since 1972, I wanted to ask for my regular table but it was too expensive for a joke that only I would get. But then I found a restaurant that justified the worst stereotypes of Paris, Café Thug.

The waiter looked like one of those thugs from a 1950’s film with a full head of black hair and a five o’clock shadow that appeared as soon as finished shaving. The type that started smoking right after his first drink from his nightstand. He waved at every other thug that passed down this side street. True to the Thug code, they waved back. No matter how bad the food, I was not sending it back.

The food was just a shade above the law. The onion soup was missing things like onions and instead of gruyere on top there were two little floating scorched pieces of bread, mismatched breasts if you will. The minute steak was 30 seconds past due and the crème brulee was as dense as the owner.

From there I started my self-guided literary tour.

Oddly enough my first stop was an art atelier where Picasso painted Guernica (7, rue de Grands Augustins), the grotesque rendering of the bombing of that town during the Spanish Civil War. An apocryphal tale surrounds that painting. A German soldier walked into the studio and asked Picasso if he did that. Supposedly Picasso responded, “No you did.”

Next was a restaurant now called Azabu (3 rue Daphne) where George Sand, Flaubert, and Turgenev gathered for dinner and cigars. Unfortunately whenever I now think of Flaubert, I think of the brilliant book by Julian Barnes Flaubert’s Parrot. Part of the work is about obsessions, one of which was finding the stuffed parrot that Flaubert once kept on his desk. This worries me. My tour is about the facades of buildings, many of which have been razed, rather than the interiors where they wrote, eat, drank, and worse. What is my obsession?

The next site was something from Baudelaire. I have never read Baudelaire, why would I want to see his building? And with my sense of direction it is taking me twenty minutes to find a building next to one another. So I detoured to the Seine to change the itinerary. Besides I am reading Pere Goriot by Balzac which is a true insight in 1830’s Paris. It speaks of a middle class boarding house and other social conventions.

Almost immediately I pass the Hotel de Voltaire where Baudelaire lived, as did one of my favorite wits, Oscar Wilde, and Richard Wagner who played Mendelssohn with gloves so his fingers would not touch the music of a Jew.

I cross the Seine into the Tuileries and I was told that I must purchase tickets for L’Orangerie at the FNAC on the Champs. I pass the Place de Concorde where there is a statue of Louise Colet with whom Flaubert had a tumultuous relationship.

On the way back to the hotel I pass rue de Buci where Verlaine once lived and Place des Vosges where at various times Victor Hugo and Georges Simenon resided. (Did you know that Simenon wrote by lining up hundreds of pencils and as one became blunt he would throw it aside and pick up another one until he completed the work which he tried to do in one sitting without sleep.)

Writing is a vocation of those who work alone and do not like the company. It is bizarre to stare at another's desk or bookshelves and to think of them as instructive.

latedaytraveler and others - this may be of interest -

http://www.laurelzuckerman.com/2011/...e-by-mary.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011...went-on-review

as well as

<i>Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949</i> by Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper

and

Herbert Lottman's <i>Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War</i>

A book I really enjoyed [and I will add that I am Australian so perhaps not as much relevance as for someone from the US], was one I found in a charity shop for $3.50. It is called "Found Meals of the Lost Generation" by Suzanne Rodriguez-Hunter [1994]. Recipes and anecdotes from 1920's Paris.

It is a collection of anecdotes of food related gatherings of people such as Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, James Joyce, F Scott Fitzerald' Josephine Baker and other icons of the Lost Generation in time spent in Paris.

I really enjoyed reading it as I had read some works by some mentioned at uni in the 70's. [Now that has shown my vintage!!]

A bit esoteric and probably hard to find [I confess to frequenting second-hand shops which has resulted on a lovely collection of France related books] but I will add it to the list.

rhon, that book sounds intriguing.

FennyFen11, looks like you have some great info. Hub and I did have dinner at Closerie des Lilas and they have a plaque on the bar where Hemingway wrote. We got in on a weeknight without reservations.

Please write a trip report about this.

John Baxter's latest book might beef interest to you:
The most beautiful Walk in The World; A Pedestrian in Paris.

You can't visit Coco Chanel's apartment. If you visit the boutique on rue Cambon, they may allow you a minute to view the mirrored staircase leading up to it.

Planning for the next trip...