Literary Cities

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LITERARY CITIES

Seeing some of the great cities of the world through the eyes of writers

Susannah Fullerton

PARIS

“The chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulant”

T.S. Eliot

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” His experiences of the city are described in his book of that name, A Moveable Feast. Paris has always attracted writers from other lands – Dickens frequently hopped across the channel, sometimes with his friend Wilkie Collins, Nancy Mitford lived in Paris and wrote about French Kings and writers, Oscar Wilde, who spoke fluent French and wrote his play Salomé in that language, came to Paris after getting out of prison, and Thackeray wrote a poem about eating bouillabaisse in a Paris restaurant; Turgenev arrived from Russia; Hans Christian Andersen came from Denmark Strindberg from Sweden; Rainer Maria Rilke from Germany; Joyce and Beckett from Ireland. Henry James was one of many Americans to spend time in Paris – Thomas Jefferson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, Richard Wright, and Sherwood Anderson were other Americans who fell in love with Paris.

And of course for French writers, Paris was Mecca, a source of endless inspiration, the home of publishers, and the place where research could be done in libraries. Voltaire, Colette, Beaumarchais, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Balzac, Proust, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Hugo, Proust, George Sand, Daudet, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Dumas (father and son), Molière, La Fontaine, De Nerval, Apollinaire, Malraux, Prévert, Cocteau, Jules Verne, Baudelaire, Valéry, Rabelais, Flaubert, Sagan, Saint-Exupéry, Camus, Duras, and Mallarmé are just a few of the fantastic French writers who have lived, loved, written and died in the City of Light.

Take a journey through literary Paris, discovering places connected with writers, dining where they dined, seeing where they set novels and poems, and discovering the literary treasures of one of the world’s greatest cities. Or better still, take this article with you to Paris and use it as a guide to see the French capital through the eyes of writers.

Literary Houses

According to Honoré de Balzac, “anyone who does not frequently visit Paris will never be completely elegant.” Balzac was one of many great French novelists who made Paris his home, and one of his houses there is now a literary museum. It is situated in the suburb of Passy and was his home from 1840 to 1847. Always in debt, Balzac lived there under a pseudonym so as to escape creditors, and was delighted that the house had doors on two levels, so he could nip out unseen if he needed to. “I live in my hole in Passy like a rat”, he wrote. It was here he worked on the books that make up his vast series of novels La Comédie Humaine, here he entertained other writers such as Dumas, Hugo and Gérard de Nerval. It is so fascinating to see the desk he literally wore down with his writing arm (he wrote for up to 19 hours per day): “I possessed it for ten years, it saw all of my misery, wiped away all of my tears, heard all my thoughts; my arm almost wore it out moving back and forth over it as I wrote”. Also on display are a model of Balzac’s hand (stolen by one visitor to the museum, but fortunately retrieved when that thief tried to leave the country), his famous turquoise studded cane, and the coffee pot that fuelled his long writing stints (he was so addicted to caffeine, that he was eventually reduced to chewing coffee beans to get enough caffeine into his system). You can look out the window of Balzac’s house and see the site once occupied by Dr Blanche’s mental asylum – this would be the last home of Guy de Maupassant when he went mad from tertiary syphilis. The Balzac house is a wonderful literary museum – well worth a visit!

Victor Hugo lived in Paris – his home can also be visited, on the gorgeous Place des Vosges. Hugo lived in this house from 1832 to 1848 then had to leave when forced into exile because of his opposition to Louis-Napoléon. Many other writers came to visit Hugo in these rooms – Dumas, Dickens, Lamartine, Gautier and Balzac. Victor Hugo was fascinated by interior decoration and these rooms reflect his taste for the ornate. But you can really find Victor Hugo all over the city – at Notre Dame, the cathedral he helped to save (people said the front of the cathedral was really a giant H for Hugo); down in the sewers he made so famous when he sent his hero Jean-Valjean into them in Les Misérables. You can see his grave in the Panthéon, and then there is Arc de Triomphe where his body rested on its memorable funeral procession. And while you are admiring Places des Vosges, you might like to remember that Georges Simenon, letter writer Madame de Sévigné, novelist Théophile Gautier and Alphonse Daudet all lived on this stunning square, while D’Artagnan comes here to visit the wicked Miladi in Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.

Monuments

Erected in 1889 for the World Fair, the Eiffel Tower, symbol of Paris, was not immediately popular. Guy de Maupassant used to lunch there often because it was the only place in Paris where he did not have to look at a view of the Eiffel Tower. For 41 years it was the tallest man-made structure in the world. The Claude Izner novel Murder on the Eiffel Tower has a corpse found on the tower, while the Edward Rutherfurd novel Paris has a character who works on its construction.

Museums

The Museum of Romantic Life is at the Foot of Montmartre. The first floor is dedicated to novelist George Sand (Amantine-Lucile- Aurore Dupin) who used to dress as a man so she could safely wander the streets of Paris at night. You can see a reconstruction of her drawing room, and there are models of her right arm and of her lover Chopin’s left hand on display. The museum also has information about Delacroix, Liszt, Lamartine and Rossini. The building was once the base of artist Ary Scheffer, who did a famous cartoon picture of Charles Dickens. Another fabulous museum is the Carnavalet, a museum of the history of Paris. That’s where you can get a real sense of how Marcel Proust lived when he wrote À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Proust actually lived in the Boulevard Haussmann, but his home there is sadly not a museum. However, the Carnavalet has a reconstruction of his cork-lined room (lined with cork as he thought that protected his asthmatic lungs from dust), and many of his possessions are on display there – the portrait of his father Dr Proust, his spectacles, his narrow brass bed, his ink and notebooks etc. Proust did most of his writing in that very bed and seeing it is a moving and intensely literary experience – not many beds in this world have been covered by so much paper and ink.

Great writers have left behind papers and letters and of course books. The Paris Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, only opened in 2004, has an extraordinary collection of material – one of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenile books, letters by Descartes, the Marquis de Sade, Stendhal, Jules Verne, Tolstoy, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, Proust and many other writers are on display there.

The Cluny Museum, or Museum of the Middle Ages, was once an abbey and is worth seeing for the building alone. It has a fabulous collection of illuminated manuscripts. It also has the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, subject of Tracy Chevalier’s novel The Lady and the Unicorn. These tapestries were saved for the nation by an author, Prosper Mérimée, who found them in 1841 in an old chateau and brought them away to be repaired and cared for.

Burial Places

The largest cemetery in Paris, and the best known is Père Lachaise, which opened in 1804 just after Napoléon was crowned. The city desperately need more room to bury people. The land had once belonged to the confessor of Louis XIV – hence its name. When the new cemetery proved rather unpopular because it was too empty and considered unfashionable, it was decided to move some notables there to give it cachet. Those chosen for reinterrment were writers. La Fontaine, author of fables who had once begged “separate me from the goats” was moved there, as was Molière – these two gave the place the needed cachet, and then others ‘moved in’. Lovers Héloise and Abelard were also reinterred in Père Lachaise. You can find many other authors as you wander what Mark Twain called “the solemn city of winding streets” – the playwright Beaumarchais, gastronomic writer Brillat-Savarin, Balzac (who died only five months after finally getting married), poet and essayist Gérard de Nerval (who hanged himself from a Paris lamppost on the corner of Slaughter Street and Rue Impasse), poet Alfred de Musset (one of George Sand’s many lovers), Alphonse Daudet (who wrote the fabulous Letters from my Windmill), Marcel Proust, Colette, symbolist poet Guillaume Apollinaire (who coined the word ‘Surrealism’), and political writer Benjamin Constant. The most visited literary grave is that of Oscar Wilde, whose body was moved to Père Lachaise 9 years after he died. His tomb was designed by Jacob Epstein and has words on it from Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. However, Wilde has recently had to be protected from his many admirers – the stone was being badly damaged by the lipstick kisses left on its surface, so now an ugly perspex fence allows you to look, but not touch. You can, if you are wealthy, still get close to Oscar – you can stay a night in L’Hotel, which is where he died. They have his last, unpaid, bill framed above the reception desk. It was a seedy dump when Oscar died there and made his famous last words about the wallpaper (“one or the other of us has got to go”), but it has been wonderfully renovated and staying in the room in which Oscar might have died (they are not absolutely sure, so you should probably stay in every room in the building just to be on the safe side) will set you back a considerable sum.

Montparnasse Cemetery in the 14th arrondissement was created from three farms. This is where you find the grave of Guy de Maupassant, often credited with writing the world’s finest short story, The Necklace. Poet Charles Baudelaire is buried here, as are Simone de Beauvoir, Irish writer Samuel Beckett, Paul Bourget, Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, Joris-Karl Huysmans (whose work À Rebours hugely influenced Oscar Wilde), playwright Eugène Ionesco, novelist Pierre Louys, poet Catulle Mendès, Henri Troyat (who wrote a wonderful biography of Tolstoy), and Peruvian poet César Vallejo.

The Panthéon was originally built as a church. It is the last resting place of notables. Alexandre Dumas (who has been much moved around after death – this is his third grave!) rests in a vault there, as do Voltaire and Rousseau. Victor Hugo was buried in the Panthéon just after it was deconsecrated – people said God had been moved out to make room for him. And Émile Zola was moved to the Panthéon five years after his death (Zola was probably murdered). He was originally buried at Montmartre – he was a hugely controversial figure at the time of his death because of his role in the Dreyfus Affair.

Restaurants

Good food has always been important in France and literary restaurants, cafes and bistros abound. If you dine at Café des Deux-Magots, you can think of Jean-Paul Sartre and his lover Simone de Beauvoir, poets Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, English poet Arthur Symons who wrote The Absinthe Drinker here, or Oscar Wilde taking his morning coffee and roll here. The café awards a literary prize in memory of its many literary patrons (with the money they charge for meals, I’m not surprised they can afford to offer a prize). At Le Procope (the oldest cafe in Paris and the place that introduced Parisians to coffee) you can admire Voltaire’s desk when you dine, and think of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau and Oscar Wilde who were all regulars there. At Café de Flore, founded in 1865, you will be eating where Simone de Beauvoir ate, while Sartre used the café as his study, and poet Jacques Prévert scribbled poems on the paper napkins. Agatha Christie’s characters dine at Le Train Bleu restaurant in her novel The Mystery of the Blue Train before setting off for the South of France (though one person is murdered en route). Writer and film director Jean Cocteau designed the menus of Le Grand Véfour restaurant in the arcades of the Palais Royal which was where Flaubert met his literary friends twice a month (they worried their risqué talk might corrupt the morals of the young waiters!) and where the ashtrays are modelled on George Sand’s hands. Poet André Malraux, Jean Cocteau, Sartre and De Beauvoir were all regular diners at Le Grand Véfour. And at La Coupole the ghosts of Henry Miller, Françoise Sagan, Samuel Beckett, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Lawrence Durrell all linger. Prunier’s was where the Hemingways and the Scott Fitzgeralds liked to dine, when they had money; James Joyce preferred Le Fouquet’s; while Brasserie Lipp was a haunt of Thornton Wilder and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

There are many more literary cafes in Paris. It is a truly wonderful experience to sit at a Paris café, watch the world go by and remember all those famous literary greats who have sat there before you.

Art Galleries

Paris is the home of great art, and some of that art has fascinating literary connections. In the marvellous Musée d’Orsay you can find many paintings of authors or works with literary associations. Zola was an early and brave supporter of the Impressionist painters – he put his friend Paul Cézanne into a novel L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece), and he was painted by another friend Édouard Manet. Charles Ephrussi, inspiration for Proust’s character Charles Swann, was a supporter of the Impressionists and a wonderful picture of one spear of white asparagus was painted especially for him by Manet (read the lovely story of that asparagus spear in The Hare with Amber Eyes). Manet also painted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Renoir painted the wife of novelist Alphonse Daudet, while Eugène Carrière painted Paul Verlaine - these portraits are on display Musée d’Orsay.

The Rodin Museum in the Hotel Biron is rich with writers. Rodin adored literature and did busts or statues of several authors - Victor Hugo (who refused to waste time ‘sitting’ for Rodin, so the artist just had to observe him moving and eating in order to create the bust), George Bernard Shaw, French novelist and poet Anne de Noailles and, most memorably and controversially, of Balzac. The monumental statue of Balzac, dressed in his cloak, stands in the grounds of the Rodin Museum and captures so brilliantly the writer’s forceful personality. It was a hugely controversial statue – the people who commissioned it loathed it and refused to pay Rodin, who then stuck it in his back garden. However, his artistic friends supported him and he knew he had created a great work of art. The Balzac statue is possibly my favourite statue in the world. German poet Rainer Maria Rilke lived for a while in the building that now houses the Rodin art.

Libraries and Book Stores

Paris has great libraries - the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is a copyright library so has a copy of every book or publication published in France; while the Sainte-Geneviève library is known not only for its two million documents, but also for its gorgeous ironwork. It was built 1838 – 50 and holds two million documents.

The city has a fabulous array of bookstores. The famed Shakespeare & Co. (which published Joyce’s Ulysses) is the place to go for books in English. Joyce, Hemingway, Ginsberg, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Henry Miller, Sherwood Anderson, Paul Valéry, Archibald MacLeish and William S. Burroughs were all visitors. The bookshop also operated as a lending library, and offered accommodation to struggling writers (its owner George Whitman, alleged great-grandson of the American poet, claimed that over 40,000 people had slept there).

Along the Seine are the stalls of the ‘Bouquinistes’, a tradition that began in the 16thC, which are now a UNESCO World Heritage site in their own right. The Seine has been described as “the only river that runs between two bookstores”. There are 240 of them and they are hotly contested properties when any bookseller gives up his stall. Books are in the very heart of Paris!

And to finish, a few favourite literary quotes about Paris …

“There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. It is a racecourse tension. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once.” James Joyce, in a letter to a friend

“In Paris they simply stared at me when I spoke to them in French. I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.” Mark Twain

“I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the World!” Charles Dickens “There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”

Ernest Hemingway

“America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” Gertrude Stein

“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation. G.K. Chesterton