Ink, Coffee and Revolution: A Literary Walk Through Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris

From Voltaire's café to Sartre's table, Sylvia Beach's bookshop where Ulysses was born, Hemingway's Luxembourg, Delacroix's last studio and the hotel room where Oscar Wilde fought his wallpaper

Paris · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Le Procope & Cour du Commerce Saint-André: Coffee, Pamphlets and the Guillotine

13 Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, 75006 Paris, France

Stand on Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie in front of the red facade with gilded lettering and old lanterns, and read the date on the front: 1686. Le Procope is often called the oldest café in Paris, and for three centuries it has been the place where writers came to talk far more than they wrote.

It was opened by a Sicilian, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, at a time when coffee was still an exotic novelty. His timing was perfect. In 1689 the Comédie-Française moved into a theatre right across this street, which is why it is still called the street of the Old Comedy. Actors, critics and playwrights poured in after every performance, and the café became the city's first literary salon with a counter.

In the eighteenth century the regulars read like a table of contents of the Enlightenment: Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. Legend has Voltaire drinking dozens of cups a day of coffee mixed with chocolate. Benjamin Franklin, in Paris to win French support for American independence, was a regular too. And inside, behind glass, you can see a bicorne hat. The story goes that a young, penniless artillery officer named Bonaparte left it as security for an unpaid bill.

Now walk around the corner into the cobbled passage behind the café, the Cour du Commerce Saint-André. In 1789 and the years after, this was a nest of revolutionaries. Jean-Paul Marat printed his furious newspaper, The Friend of the People, at number 8, and Danton lived just steps away. Legend says Doctor Guillotin's new machine was tested here on sheep before it was ever used on people. Nobody can prove it... but the legend refuses to leave.

Look into the shop windows on the left side of the passage: in one of them, the base of a stone tower from the wall that King Philippe Auguste built around Paris around the year 1200 still stands, right among the tables. Then come back out and cross the Boulevard Saint-Germain into Rue de l'Odéon, the gently rising street leading south toward a theatre with columns.
2. 12 Rue de l'Odéon: Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company

12 Rue de l'Odéon, 75006 Paris, France

Walk slowly up Rue de l'Odéon and stop at number 12, an ordinary shopfront with a plaque beside the door. Notice the pavements under your feet, too: this was one of the very first streets in Paris built with raised sidewalks, in the 1780s, when the theatre at the top was new.

In 1921 a young American from New Jersey, Sylvia Beach, moved her English-language bookshop and lending library here and called it Shakespeare and Company. Opposite, at number 7, her partner Adrienne Monnier ran a French bookshop, so this short street became a bridge between two literatures. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald and a young, broke Ernest Hemingway all came through the door. Hemingway later remembered that Sylvia let him borrow books when he could not afford to buy them.

Then came the great gamble. James Joyce's Ulysses had been banned in the United States after excerpts were judged obscene, and no publisher would touch it. So Sylvia Beach, a bookseller with no experience of publishing, published it herself. The first copies arrived on the second of February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, and the novel that changed modern literature was first sold from this shop.

In 1941, during the Occupation, a German officer came in and demanded her last copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake from the window. She refused. He said he would come back and confiscate everything. Within hours, with the help of friends, she emptied the shop into an upstairs flat and painted over the name. The shop never reopened, and Sylvia spent months interned by the occupiers.

Beach later wrote that, in August 1944, Hemingway drove up this street with a jeep full of soldiers to free it, and went up on the roof hunting snipers. The name lived on: a later bookshop by the river took it up in her honour, but this was where it began. Now walk on to the top of the street and the grand semicircle of houses facing the theatre.
3. Théâtre de l'Odéon: Figaro, Fire and the Occupation of 1968

Place de l'Odéon, 75006 Paris, France

Stand in the curved square and face the theatre: a great stone block fronted by eight columns, with nothing on top but a flat roof, almost like a Roman temple. The houses around you were designed together with it, so the whole square feels like the theatre's front row.

It was built between 1779 and 1782 for the actors of the Comédie-Française, by the architects Marie-Joseph Peyre and Charles De Wailly. Queen Marie-Antoinette came to the opening. And two years later, in 1784, it hosted one of the most explosive first nights in French history: Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro.

The king had banned the play for years, because in it a clever servant outwits his noble master and asks what the aristocrat has ever done to deserve his privileges. When it was finally allowed, the crowds crushed against the doors, and the play ran for dozens of performances. Five years later came the Revolution, and many people have since said that Figaro fired the first shot.

The building has burned twice, in 1799 and in 1818, and each time it was rebuilt. Then, in May 1968, it caught a different kind of fire. On the fifteenth of May, students and actors stormed in and occupied it for about a month, turning the auditorium into a non-stop public debate where anyone could take the stage. The theatre's director, the great actor Jean-Louis Barrault, tried to talk with them. A few months later, the government dismissed him.

Today it is the Odéon, Théâtre de l'Europe, staging plays from across the continent. Walk along the left side of the building and look under the arcades: for a long time booksellers kept stalls here, and literary Paris browsed between the pillars. Then cross Rue de Vaugirard and go through the gates into the Luxembourg Garden. Just inside on your left, a long shady pool is waiting.
4. Fontaine Médicis: A Queen's Grotto in the Luxembourg

Jardin du Luxembourg, Rue de Médicis, 75006 Paris, France

Walk along the long, dark pool under the plane trees until you face the fountain at its end, an Italian grotto of rough stone, half palace, half cave. Above the water, a huge bronze giant leans out of the rock, glaring down at a white marble couple lying in each other's arms.

The giant is Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops. The lovers are the nymph Galatea and the shepherd Acis. In the myth, Polyphemus loves Galatea, finds her with Acis, and crushes him with a boulder. So what you are watching is the second before the tragedy. The sculptures were added by Auguste Ottin in the 1860s, and the lovers have no idea what is about to fall on them.

The fountain itself is much older. It was built around 1630 for Marie de Médicis, widow of King Henri the Fourth, probably by the Florentine fountain-maker Tommaso Francini. Marie had grown up in the Pitti Palace in Florence and was homesick, so she asked for a palace and a garden that would remind her of home. The palace you can see through the trees, built from 1615, was the result.

She did not enjoy it for long. In November 1630, in a confrontation remembered as the Day of the Dupes, she tried to make her son, Louis the Thirteenth, dismiss Cardinal Richelieu. For a few hours everyone believed she had won. Then the king backed the cardinal. Marie went into exile and died in poverty in Cologne in 1642, far from her Florentine garden. The great cycle of paintings Rubens made for her palace now hangs in the Louvre.

And the fountain has moved. In the 1860s, when Haussmann cut the new Rue de Médicis, it was dismantled and rebuilt about thirty metres away, and the long pool was added. Today the palace is the French Senate. Follow the path toward the palace and come out onto the wide terrace in front of it, where children sail boats on the great pool.
5. Grand Bassin du Luxembourg: Hemingway's Pigeons and Stein's Lost Generation

Jardin du Luxembourg, Rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris, France

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.
6. Saint-Sulpice: Delacroix's Angel and the Da Vinci Code Myth

2 Rue Palatine, 75006 Paris, France

Stand in Place Saint-Sulpice by the fountain and look across at the church: a two-storey wall of columns, and two towers that do not match. The one on the left is shorter and was never finished. The builders ran out of time, money and, eventually, the Revolution arrived.

Saint-Sulpice took well over a century to build, from 1646, and it is one of the largest churches in Paris. Victor Hugo married Adèle Foucher here in 1822, and both the Marquis de Sade and Charles Baudelaire were baptised here, which says something about the range of the parish. Just inside the doors, look for the two holy-water basins: they are giant seashells, a gift from the Republic of Venice to King Francis the First.

Then go to the first chapel on the right. In his last great work, finished in 1861, Eugène Delacroix painted Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. Jacob struggles with all his weight, while the angel holds him off almost gently, as if amused. Delacroix was old and ill, and he moved house to be near this chapel. You will see that house at the end of the walk.

Now find the thin brass line running across the floor and up to a white marble obelisk in the north transept. It is a gnomon, an astronomical instrument from the 1740s. Sunlight through a small hole in a window falls on the line and marks the solstices and equinoxes, which helped fix the date of Easter. In 2003 the novel The Da Vinci Code turned it into the Rose Line, a secret pagan meridian. The church put up a notice politely explaining that none of that is true.

Outside, the fountain in the square shows four great preachers of the seventeenth century, all of them bishops, none of them ever made a cardinal. Parisians call it the Fountain of the Four Cardinal Points, a pun, because in French point also means never. From the square, walk north up Rue Bonaparte to the old abbey with the square bell tower.
7. Saint-Germain-des-Prés: The Abbey of the Merovingian Kings

3 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 75006 Paris, France

Face the stocky square bell tower at the corner of the boulevard and try to imagine it alone among fields. That is what des Prés means: in the meadows. When this abbey was founded, Paris was a small walled town on its island, and all of this was open countryside along the river.

Around the year 543, King Childebert, son of Clovis, founded a monastery here to hold precious relics he had brought back from a campaign in Spain, including the tunic of Saint Vincent. The bishop of Paris, Germain, consecrated it, and when he died in 576 he was buried here and gave the abbey its name. For more than a century, Merovingian kings were laid to rest inside, so this was once the royal necropolis of the Franks.

Viking raiders sacked and burned the abbey in the ninth century. What you see now was rebuilt afterwards: the tower dates from around the year 1000, one of the oldest bell towers in France, and the choir was consecrated by Pope Alexander the Third in 1163. It is often called the oldest church in Paris. During the Revolution, the abbey was turned into a gunpowder works, and in 1794 a huge explosion of stored saltpetre destroyed much of the monastery around it.

Step inside if you can. A recent restoration revealed nineteenth-century painted walls and starry blue vaults that had been hidden under grime for generations. In a side chapel lies René Descartes, the philosopher of I think, therefore I am, though the story goes that his skull went on its own long journey and ended up in a museum.

And look around: this square became, after 1945, the centre of the intellectual world. Jazz in cellar clubs, black polo necks, endless arguments about freedom. Walk to the corner of the boulevard, past the café with the two Chinese figures, to the one next door with green awnings.
8. Café de Flore & Les Deux Magots: Sartre, Beauvoir and the Stove

172 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris, France

Stop on the corner and look at the two cafés side by side: Les Deux Magots, with its green awning facing the church, and the Café de Flore, with its white awnings and red-and-white chairs. Across the boulevard, a third institution, Brasserie Lipp, completes the triangle.

Inside Les Deux Magots, high on a pillar, sit two carved Chinese figures, the magots. They are older than the café: they belonged to a shop selling silk and novelties that stood here in the nineteenth century, and the café, opened in 1885, kept the name. The Flore opened a couple of years later and took its name from a statue of the goddess Flora. Lipp was founded in 1880 by an Alsatian, Léonard Lipp, who served beer and sauerkraut to homesick fellow refugees after the war of 1870.

During the German occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir came to the Flore every day, morning to night. Their rooms were freezing, coal was scarce, and the Flore had a stove. So they sat upstairs at separate tables, writing for hours. Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir's early novels took shape partly over cups of ersatz coffee in this room.

After the liberation, journalists discovered existentialism, and suddenly tourists came to stare at the philosophers. Sartre complained and retreated. The rival café created its own literary prize in 1933, the Prix des Deux Magots, first awarded to Raymond Queneau. And legend says that at Les Deux Magots, in 1936, Picasso first noticed the photographer Dora Maar, playing a dangerous game with a knife between her gloved fingers.

Lipp has a darker story. On the twenty-ninth of October 1965, the Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka was arrested on the pavement outside it by French police officers and handed over. He was never seen again. The case is still not fully solved. The little square in front of you is named Place Sartre-Beauvoir. Now walk west along the boulevard to Rue des Saints-Pères and follow it north, all the way to the river.
9. Quai Voltaire: Where Voltaire Died and Baudelaire Wrote

27 Quai Voltaire, 75007 Paris, France

Lean on the stone parapet beside the dark green boxes of the bouquinistes, the riverside booksellers, and look across the Seine at the long facade of the Louvre. Then turn around and find the corner house at number 27, at the end of Rue de Beaune, with a plaque on its wall.

On your way here you crossed Rue Jacob, and a few doors along it, at number 56, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay signed the Treaty of Paris with Britain on the third of September 1783, ending the American War of Independence. But this quay belongs to another old man. In February 1778, Voltaire came back to Paris after almost thirty years of exile, aged eighty-three, and stayed in this house as the guest of the Marquis de Villette.

Paris went wild. Crowds blocked the quay to catch sight of him, and at the Comédie-Française his bust was crowned with laurels on stage while he watched from his box. It was too much for him. He died in this house on the thirtieth of May 1778. The Church refused him a Christian burial in Paris, so, the story goes, his nephew propped the body upright in a carriage, dressed as if alive, and drove it out of the city to an abbey in Champagne, where it was buried before any ban could arrive. In 1791 the Revolution carried him to the Panthéon, and gave this quay his name.

A few doors back toward the east, at number 19, the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire has had an extraordinary guest list. Charles Baudelaire lived there in the late 1850s, around the time The Flowers of Evil came out and was prosecuted for obscenity. Richard Wagner stayed there working on The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and a young Oscar Wilde stayed in 1883, full of plans, long before the hotel where we will meet him later.

The bouquinistes have sold books along these quays since the sixteenth century. Before the 2024 Olympic opening ceremony, the authorities wanted to remove their boxes for security, and after a public outcry the plan was dropped. Walk east along the river onto Quai Malaquais, then turn right into Rue Bonaparte, to the gates of the most famous art school in France.
10. École des Beaux-Arts: Queen Margot's Convent and Rodin's Rejection

14 Rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris, France

Peer through the gates at number 14 Rue Bonaparte into the courtyard: a jumble of classical facades, arches, columns and fragments of old buildings, as if someone had collected pieces of French history and set them up like a puzzle. Which is more or less exactly what happened.

In 1608, Marguerite de Valois, the famous Queen Margot, first wife of Henri the Fourth, founded a convent here for Augustinian friars. She lived across the street in a grand house by the river, and had the monks sing day and night. The chapel of that convent still stands in the courtyard, one of the oldest pieces of the site.

During the Revolution, mobs were smashing royal tombs and statues across France. A young painter named Alexandre Lenoir gathered as much as he could rescue into this empty convent, and in 1795 opened it as the Museum of French Monuments. He saved sculptures that would otherwise have been lost for ever. Some of the stone fragments built into these courtyards are leftovers from his collection.

From 1816 the site became the École des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious art school in France, with its competition for the Prix de Rome. Degas, Renoir and Seurat studied here, and architects came from as far away as America. But the most famous name of all is a rejection. A young man called Auguste Rodin applied three times, in the 1850s, and was turned down every time. He went on to become the most celebrated sculptor in the world without them.

And this very street has one more birth certificate: Édouard Manet was born just a few doors north, in 1832, when the street was still called Rue des Petits-Augustins after Margot's friars. Now cross Rue Bonaparte into Rue des Beaux-Arts, the short street running east, and look for a discreet hotel at number 13.
11. L'Hôtel, Rue des Beaux-Arts: Oscar Wilde's Last Room

13 Rue des Beaux-Arts, 75006 Paris, France

Stop in front of number 13, a narrow, discreet hotel with a small plaque on the wall. It is called simply L'Hôtel today, but in 1900 it was the Hôtel d'Alsace, a cheap lodging house, and the man in its back room was one of the most famous writers in Europe... living under a false name.

Oscar Wilde had been the toast of London: The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, epigrams quoted in every drawing room. Then, in 1895, he was convicted of gross indecency for his relationships with men and sentenced to two years of hard labour. When he came out in 1897 he was ruined, his health broken, his name unspeakable. He crossed to France and called himself Sebastian Melmoth.

In Paris he drifted from café to café, borrowing money from friends, writing almost nothing. The owner of this hotel let him run up debts and looked after him kindly. Wilde said he was dying beyond his means. And of the hideous wallpaper in his room, he is reported to have said that one of them had to go.

He died here on the thirtieth of November 1900, of meningitis, at the age of forty-six. Hours before, he was received into the Catholic Church, something he had flirted with all his life. Only a handful of mourners followed the coffin. He was buried first in a modest grave outside the city, and moved some years later to a famous monument in a great Paris cemetery.

Today the hotel is quietly luxurious, and the room is decorated in his memory, the wallpaper finally on his side. Writers and musicians come to sleep where he died, which he might have found very funny. Now continue to the end of the street, turn right down Rue de Seine and right again into Rue Jacob, and look for a tiny square with lanterns on your left.
12. Rue Jacob & Place de Furstemberg: Natalie Barney's Temple and Delacroix's Studio

6 Rue de Furstemberg, 75006 Paris, France

Walk into the tiny square and stop under the trees: a single old lamp post crowned with white globes, a few paulownias that flower purple in spring, and the sound of the city falling away. Film-makers love it. It is one of the most romantic corners of Paris, and it was built as a stable yard.

The square was laid out in 1699 by Cardinal Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg, the German-born abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as the forecourt of his palace's stables and service buildings. The abbey you saw earlier owned all this land, and its abbots lived like princes. After the Revolution the abbey's property was sold off piece by piece, and what had been a yard for horses and carriages slowly became one of the most secret little squares in Saint-Germain. The paulownia trees, with their huge heart-shaped leaves, came later and stole the show.

And at number 20, behind a courtyard, the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney held her literary salon on Friday afternoons for some sixty years. In her garden stands a small Doric temple she called the Temple of Friendship. Colette, Djuna Barnes and Ezra Pound came to her Fridays, and her salon was one of the few places where women writers who loved women could be entirely themselves.

Now look for number 6, at the corner of the square. In December 1857 Eugène Delacroix, ill and in his late fifties, moved here to be close to his murals at Saint-Sulpice. He had a studio built in the garden behind and worked here until his death in August 1863. Today it is the Musée national Eugène Delacroix, where you can see his palette, his letters and the quiet garden he looked at.

So the walk ends where it began, with coffee, ink and arguments: Voltaire at the Procope, Joyce on Rue de l'Odéon, Sartre at the Flore, Wilde at his wallpaper, and Delacroix here, painting angels to the last. Saint-Germain still keeps its writers... they just have better heating now. Stay a moment in the square, and let the lanterns come on.