By Rachel Kaplan, French Links Tours

As a writer who has been living in Paris since 1993, there is no question in my mind that the French capital is the writer’s quintessential city. It also happens to be the city of literary pilgrimages – its only other rival being London. Everywhere you look there are statues and monuments to writers, not to mention house museums. If you are interested in literature, and in particular French literature, then Paris warrants at least several visits.

My literary tour usually starts on the Left Bank, perhaps because this is where some of the most famous 20th- century writers made their home. A stone’s throw from Notre Dame Cathedral is Shakespeare and Company, owned by the learned and aged George Whitman, whom the French like to refer to as “the grandson of the American poet Walt Whitman.” In spirit only, of course. This crowded, dusty, and friendly bookshop overlooking the Seine, is redolent with memories of poets and novelists who have streamed through here for years, including Laurence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg. Starving poets who aren’t fussy about accommodations can still crash here for the night. In any case, the store is chock full of books by authors who starved in Paris, including Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, and you may be lucky enough to come across a first edition or two. Prices are reasonable.

From there, I like to wander over to the Carrefour de l’Odéon in the sixth arrondissement, and head up the rue de l’Odéon where you will still see a plaque in homage to the original Shakespeare & Co., founded by Sylvia Beach in the 1920s, and which came to be known as the most famous English-language lending library in Paris. Authors such as Hemingway and James Joyce were invited to borrow books in exchange for a modest fee – as it turned out, they sometimes didn’t have the cash to pay the fee, and would on occasion forget to return the book. That didn’t faze Ms. Beach, who had both the pluck and the courage to finance the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses against great odds, including the fact that the book was banned in the English-speaking world for its allegedly pornographic and scatological subject matter. In those days when Joyce had the temerity to write openly about defecation, masturbation and allude to the ocean around Dublin as “the snot-green sea,” it seems to have scandalized many people in high places, including the novelist Virginia Woolf.

Fortunately, Joyce’s French printer didn’t read English, so it was all Greek to him. Unfortunately, Joyce turned out to be a high-maintenance perfectionist, and made many changes on proof, which is a very costly proposition. Publishing the “great Mr. Joyce,” as Beach liked to call him, virtually bankrupted Shakespeare & Company, even though the fledgling operation gained immortality in the process. The saddest part of all is that although Sylvia Beach ostensibly owned the worldwide rights to Ulysses, once the book was published, Joyce did an about-face and sold the manuscript to Random House for $45,000 – a rather tidy sum in those days. What’s even more astonishing is that to her last hour, Beach vigorously defended Joyce’s reputation and never alluded to this episode, leaving it to subsequent literary scholars to unearth the painful truth.

Be sure to stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens further up the street, considered by many aficionados to be the most elegant gardens in central Paris. Immortalized by scores of writers and painters, including Victor Hugo in Les Misérables and Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, you will see that some of France’s greatest poets also get their due in the gardens, including Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire. Although these artists scandalized the public in their lifetime, today visitors from all over come to admire their weathered stone busts charmingly set off by the park’s plantings and ancient trees. They too must have come here to meditate upon a lost love or bitter literary quarrel, hardly ever imaging that they would have a permanent place in such a verdant corner of Paris.

Don’t pass up the nearby Rue de Fleurus, where you will find a plaque in homage to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on the façade of an unassuming building. Here these two ladies made literary history – Stein held court with writers, while Toklas poured tea and served the wives cookies. By the way, although Stein gave far more credence to male artists and writers, she never forgave Sylvia Beach for publishing Joyce’s work rather than her own. Later, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she would enjoy both literary revenge and bestsellerdom. It turned out to be a costly piece of literature – through it Stein lost all her friends. Although few people read her work today, she is best remembered for having once possessed one of the finest collections of Modernist art, which was saved during the war, and later sold upon the death of Alice B. Toklas. (None of the works are in any French public collection, however).

Now you may be ready for a bit of lunch – or a glass of wine. Writers still favor three Left Bank literary cafés in Paris: the Café de la Mairie on the Place Saint Sulpice (it even inspired a French movie about a writer suffering from writer’s block, starring Fabrice Lucchini), the Café de Flore and the Café Aux Deux Magots. These are smoky, noisy and cozy places, where writers still meet with editors to go over proofs, with publishers to go over contracts and where they can still sit for hours watching the world go by, totally undisturbed. Of course, they prefer to sit on the second floor, above the din and the tourists. What distinguishes the Flore and the Deux Magots in particular from other cafés in Paris is that both offer annual literary prizes and both feature the latest critically acclaimed novels in a special display case. During the war, these cafés, which also catered to German officers, offered both warmth and wine – so it’s not surprising that this is where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court and wrote.

In fact, these cafés became both their study and their living room; a photo on one wall of the Deux Magots shows de Beauvoir bent over a notebook writing like a diligent schoolgirl. On the same wall, you can also see a photo of Hemingway and Janet Flanner (the New Yorker columnist who wrote under the pen-name Genet, before the French writer was even on anyone’s screen). Both are drinking American cocktails at the Liberation, and both are dressed in the military garb of a war correspondent. While Hemingway made a big deal of being in Paris during the Liberation, it seems that the only thing he liberated was the Ritz’s wine cellar. Today, the hotel pays him tribute with a discrete bar named after the author. (Don’t go there for drinks unless you’re on expense account – they are way overpriced.)

If you still have some steam left in the afternoon, you may want to take the Metro to Passy, and visit the Maison de Balzac, the only house-museum in Paris devoted to the author. Here you will find the well-worn desk where he wrote and edited much of The Human Comedy, and where he penned letter after letter to Madame Hanska, his mistress and the woman he finally wed six months prior to his death in 1850. Balzac’s bust by the academic sculptor David d’Angers presides over the writer’s study, but Rodin’s controversial statue of him is only to be found on the Boulevard Raspail near the Vavin Metro station. It wasn’t until 1939 that it finally found its final resting place. Balzac is the only novelist that has a statue on both the Right and the Left Banks for Paris. The earlier one, done by Falguière, is to be found on the rue Balzac, formerly the rue Fontaine, where he died of gangrene and overwork, with only Victor Hugo at his side. As you walk in the picturesque rose garden of the Balzac museum, you will see the Eiffel Tower in the distance, and regret that Balzac never met the man who changed the face of Paris, and almost went to jail during the scandal over the Panama Canal. 

When I first wrote about the Balzac museum for Little-Known Museums In and Around Paris in 1995, I was struck by the simple way the novelist lived and that the untold riches that he dreamed of were only to be found in his novels. When you descend to the basement where there is an excellent research library, be sure to stop by the novelist’s “family tree” of over 3,000 characters, all of whom people his vast opus unforgettably. Then, when you get home, pick up a copy of Cousin Bette or The Père Goriot, and discover Balzac’s Paris all over again. You will see that the streets, the shops, the cafés and the people you have met are still with us even now, more than 150 years later. Perhaps, that is why Paris remains a writer’s city, because unlike any other, it beckons the imagination of geniuses, allowing them to spin words into dazzling and lasting literature.

Rachel Kaplan is the author of Little-Known Museums In and Around Paris (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.) and offers literary walking tours through French Links Tours.