Grand Bassin du Luxembourg: Hemingway's Pigeons and Stein's Lost Generation
Why is it significant?
Take one of the green metal chairs, pull it to the edge of the octagonal pool, and sit down like a Parisian. Children push little wooden sailboats across the water with long sticks, the fountain splashes in the middle, and behind you the Senate looks on.
Key Facts
| Place | Grand Bassin du Luxembourg: Hemingway's Pigeons and Stein's Lost Generation |
|---|---|
| Address | Jardin du Luxembourg, Rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.84660, 2.33710 |
| Part of Walk | Ink, Coffee and Revolution: A Literary Walk Through Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Take one of the green metal chairs, pull it to the edge of the octagonal pool, and sit down like a Parisian. Children push little wooden sailboats across the water with long sticks, the fountain splashes in the middle, and behind you the Senate looks on. On the terraces above, a ring of stone queens and famous women of France keeps watch.
In the early 1920s, Ernest Hemingway crossed this garden almost every day. He was young, writing stories nobody would buy, and in A Moveable Feast he claimed he walked through the Luxembourg on purpose when he was hungry, because here he could not smell food and could look at paintings in the museum on an empty stomach. He also told a story of catching the garden's pigeons for dinner, hiding them in his son's pram. Most biographers suspect that one was invented... or at least much improved.
His route led just west of the garden, to 27 Rue de Fleurus, the apartment of Gertrude Stein, where Picasso and Matisse hung side by side on the walls. Stein told Hemingway that all the young people who had served in the war were a lost generation. He put the phrase at the front of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926, and it became the label for a whole era.
Another American knew this pool well. William Faulkner lived for a few months in 1925 on Rue Servandoni, just around the corner, and came here to watch the children and the boats. Years later he ended his dark novel Sanctuary right here, in the Luxembourg Garden, on a grey autumn afternoon with music playing.
Before you go, look for one more surprise in the western part of the garden: a small bronze Statue of Liberty, a model by Bartholdi, the sculptor of the one in New York. Then leave by the northern gate on Rue de Vaugirard and walk up Rue Férou, the quiet street that runs north toward two unequal towers.