Themed Paris Urban Walk – Hemingway’s Latin Quarter

Themed Paris Urban Walk – Hemingway’s Latin Quarter originally appeared in easy hiker

Paris Urban Walk III

The first two episodes in this short series of Paris walks took their cues from paintings and historic photos. This Paris urban walk shall be guided by words. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast

I would like to invite you to follow me on a literary walk through the Paris of Ernest Hemingway – or rather: the small corner of it that he describes in what is (perhaps) his most widely read book, A Moveable Feast. We will be following him on walks that he undertook himself – some of them through streets that appear to have changed little since the 1920s.

Cross over the bridge behind Notre Dame Cathedral to the adjacent Ile St Louis …

… and leave the island by crossing the Pont de la Tournelle onto the Left Bank. Continue straight up the Rue Cardinal Lemoine, crossing first the Boulevard St Germain and then the Rue des Ecoles.

Hemingway walked this way many times, because it was “the shortest route” between the river and the house at the very top of Rue Cardinal Lemoine (no. 74) where he and his wife Hadley lived from January 1922 until August 1923.

You find the Place Contrescarpe on your right hand side, immediately behind the Hemingway house. This square and the Rue Mouffetard down your left hand side, a “wonderful narrow crowded market street”, would have been very much “home” for the young couple, and if you turn right, you will pass the kiosque were Hemingway bought his daily racing paper.

You also pass the now rather swanky Cafe Delmas, called the Cafe des Amateurs in the 1920s and lovingly described by Hemingway as “the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard”, “a sad café” and “evilly run”.

There was, Hemingway tells us, one particular reason why he loved to walk through the Luxembourg gardens so much: when you were skipping meals, he says, it was the best place to walk because you “saw and smelled nothing to eat from Vaugirard to the Observatoire”.

This third and last walk is brought to you by New York Habitat. Immerse yourself in Paris’s Latin quarter by staying in one of their choice apartments.

  Read the first and second themed Paris urban walks, in Montmartre and in Belleville.

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