Place de la Contrescarpe & Rue Mouffetard: Hemingway's First Paris
Why is it significant?
Find a spot by the fountain in the middle of this little round square, with its café terraces and its plane trees, and listen. On weekend mornings Rue Mouffetard, sloping away to the south, fills with market stalls, cheese, oysters, accordion music.
Key Facts
| Place | Place de la Contrescarpe & Rue Mouffetard: Hemingway's First Paris |
|---|---|
| Address | Place de la Contrescarpe, 75005 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.84460, 2.34940 |
| Part of Walk | Students, Saints and Gladiators: Paris's Latin Quarter from the Sorbonne to the Panthéon |
| Generated | Generated |
Find a spot by the fountain in the middle of this little round square, with its café terraces and its plane trees, and listen. On weekend mornings Rue Mouffetard, sloping away to the south, fills with market stalls, cheese, oysters, accordion music. It feels like a village... and that is exactly how a young American writer described it a hundred years ago.
Walk a few steps into Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, the street running north from the square, to number 74. In January 1922 Ernest Hemingway, twenty-two years old and almost unknown, moved in here with his first wife, Hadley. Two small rooms, no hot water, a toilet on the landing and a dance hall downstairs. He rented a separate room to write in, around the corner at 39 Rue Descartes, in the very building where the poet Paul Verlaine had died in 1896. Decades later, in A Moveable Feast, he wrote that they were very poor and very happy.
A few doors down the same street, at number 71, James Joyce was lent a flat in 1921 by the writer Valery Larbaud, and there he finished Ulysses. So within a stone's throw of this fountain, one man was learning to write short, clean sentences, while the other was completing the most sprawling novel of the century.
The square itself has older ghosts. Tradition says a tavern here, the Pine Cone, welcomed Rabelais and the poets of the Pléiade in the sixteenth century. And the name Contrescarpe comes from the outer slope of the ditch that ran along the city wall of Philippe Auguste, which passed right here around 1200.
Rue Mouffetard is older still. It follows the line of the Roman road that left Lutetia for the south, toward Italy. Its strange name probably comes from the stench rising from the tanneries and dyers along the little river Bièvre below. From the square, take little Rue Rollin and its stone stairs down to Rue Monge, where a hidden Roman arena is waiting.