Ernest Hemingway · 1964 · exile

Ernest Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the twenties, written thirty years later and published after his death. He was poor, newly married and learning to write, and the book is really an address book - two flats, a rented room, a bookshop, a salon and a dozen cafes, nearly all of them inside one square mile of the Left Bank.

1. 1
   Hotel d'Angleterre

   Room 14, rue Jacob, in December 1921 - the first night in Paris for a twenty-two-year-old newspaperman and his wife, arriving with letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson and very little else.

2. 2
   74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine

   The first flat: two rooms on the third floor, no hot water and no lavatory but a pail, above a bal musette. He calls it the poorest address in Paris, and the plaque there now says they were very poor and very happy.

3. 3
   Place de la Contrescarpe

   The square at the top of rue Mouffetard, with the Cafe des Amateurs on it - which he describes as the cesspool of the quarter - and the market street running down, where they did their shopping.

4. 4
   39 rue Descartes

   Round the corner he rents a top-floor room purely to work in, in the hotel where Verlaine died - carrying the notebooks and pencils up, keeping the fire drawing, writing one true sentence and going on from there.

5. 5
   Place Saint-Michel

   The good cafe on the square where he writes the Michigan stories, orders rum St James and, when a story goes well, oysters and cold white wine - and where a girl with a face like a fresh-minted coin comes in out of the rain.

6. 6
   Shakespeare and Company

   Sylvia Beach's shop at 12 rue de l'Odeon, where he joins the lending library on credit because she trusts an address that could not have been poorer - and reads his way through Turgenev, Tolstoy and Lawrence.

7. 7
   27 rue de Fleurus

   Gertrude Stein's drawing room, hung with pictures nobody else was buying, where he is fed cakes and eau-de-vie and told about writing and about his own lost generation - until they fall out over things not said aloud.

8. 8
   Gare de Lyon

   Hadley packs everything he has written into a valise to bring to him in Lausanne, and it is stolen at the station - originals and carbons together. It is the single worst thing in the book and he takes two chapters to say so.

9. 9
   113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

   The second flat, over a sawmill, with the whine of the saw and the smell of cut wood coming up all day - and Ezra Pound round the corner, and the boxing, and the racing at Auteuil and Enghien.

10. 10
    La Closerie des Lilas

    The nearest good cafe to the flat and the one he does his real work in - a saucer of cafe creme, a notebook and two pencils, Marshal Ney's statue outside, and a gold plaque on his table there to this day.

11. 11
    Le Dome

    Crowded with models who had worked, painters who had worked until the light went, writers who had finished a day's work for better or worse, and drinkers and characters, some of whom he knew and some who were only decoration.

12. 12
    La Rotonde

    The Montparnasse crossroads: three big cafes within fifty yards of each other, all of them full of people being seen, and Hemingway rather pleased with himself for preferring the one further up the boulevard.

13. 13
    Le Select

    Another of the Vavin corner cafes, and part of the geography of a working day - breakfast in one, an afternoon's writing in another, and an evening among people he is already sharpening his pen on.

14. 14
    Dingo Bar

    10 rue Delambre, where Scott Fitzgerald walks in and introduces himself, praises Hemingway's work extravagantly, asks whether he slept with his wife before marrying her, and then turns white and passes out.

15. 15
    Michaud's

    The expensive restaurant on the corner of rue Jacob and rue des Saints-Peres, where Joyce ate with his family - and where Fitzgerald raises the question that ends with the two of them inspecting him in the lavatory.

16. 16
    The Louvre

    He walks Fitzgerald over to look at the statues, to settle by comparison a question about anatomy that Zelda had put in his head - one of the odder errands in twentieth-century literature, and told absolutely straight.

17. 17
    Brasserie Lipp

    A distingue of cold beer, potatoes in oil and a cervelas with mustard sauce, eaten on the bench against the mirror - and the passage everyone quotes when they want to explain what this book does with food.

18. 18
    Les Deux Magots

    Drinks with James Joyce, and the place where the quarter came to be looked at - close enough to Lipp that a bad afternoon could be moved from one to the other without much walking.

19. 19
    The Jardin du Luxembourg

    He walks through the gardens rather than the streets because there is nothing to smell on the way, and looks at the Cezannes in the museum on an empty stomach - deciding hunger is good discipline and Cezanne knew about it.

20. 20
    Schruns

    The winters are spent in the Vorarlberg, skiing with a pioneer of high mountain touring and revising The Sun Also Rises - and the second Schruns winter is where he dates the beginning of the end of his first marriage.

21. 21
    Lyon

    Scott Fitzgerald asks him along to collect a car left behind in Lyon, then fails to arrive on the agreed train - the beginning of the funniest and most merciless portrait in the book.

22. 22
    Macon

    They drive north in a car with no roof, stopping repeatedly for rain and for Fitzgerald's conviction that he is dying of congestion of the lungs - treated with a thermometer, whisky and diminishing patience.

23. 23
    The Ritz

    In 1956 the hotel returns two trunks he left in the basement in 1930, full of the notebooks he kept in those cafes - and the old man in Cuba writes them up into this, and there is never any ending to Paris.