Some of the sites included in Literary Paris:

Hôtel de Pimodan/Lauzun
17, quai d’Anjou (4th arr.)
Meeting place of the Club des Haschichins, whose members included Balzac, Dumas, Delacroix, and Baudelaire. Under a doctor’s guidance, the men were each given a saucer in which a thumb-sized portion of greenish jam—hashish—had been placed. The doctor told them, “This will be deducted from your share in Paradise.”

The Salon of Nathalie Barney
20, rue Jacob (6th arr.)
Nathalie, said Colette, was a beautiful, rich American with “sea-blue eyes” who seduced many a Parisian society woman. She held parties in her home here, where guests passed through a Greek temple at the bottom of her garden, on whose Doric columns she had engraved “à l’amitié.” Among her guests were Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Sherwood Anderson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Home of Victor Hugo
130, avenue d’Eylau (16th arr.)
At seventy-five, Victor Hugo was advised by his doctor to stop his womanizing. Instead, he moved from his fourth-floor apartment to a small house here to avoid climbing so many stairs.

Rue du Pot de Fer (5th arr.)
Shortly after arriving in Paris, Orwell moved into a cheap hotel at 6, rue du Pot de Fer, the street whose hodgepodge of eccentric, poor residents he would make famous in Down and Out in Paris and London. “It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.”

The Bois de Boulogne        
Pavillon d’Armenonville, Allée de Longchamp (16th arr.)
Marcel Proust—like his characters—was a frequent visitor here. It was in the Armenonville restaurant where Swann and Odette listened to the “little phrase” of music that would become a recurring motif in In Search of Lost Time. Each time Swann heard the sonata he thought of the Bois de Boulogne, with its “moonlight preventing the leaves from moving.”

Chez Haynes
3, rue Clauzel (9th arr.)
France’s first soul food restaurant, (or “Soulsville in Paris,” as some called it) drew black and white Americans, as well as curious French looking to discover chitterlings, corn bread, and collard greens. Richard Wright was a frequent guest at the restaurant. Chez Haynes moved to its current address in 1964.

>> back to previous page