You’ve trudged through the Louvre, said Bob Ford in The Philadelphia Inquirer. You’ve seen the “Big Three”—Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. You’ve also dodged traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, admired the Eiffel Tower, and visited Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. “Congratulations. Now it is time to see Paris”—for real. One of the best ways to explore this great city is to walk in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway, who lived in the 5th and 6th arrondissements—two neighborhoods on the Left Bank of the Seine—from 1921 to 1928.
Start at the Pantheon, shrine to many of France’s greatest citizens, and wend your way “through narrow streets” to the Place de la Contrescarpe. Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, had an apartment just off the cafe-lined square—a third-floor walk-up at 74 Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Around the corner, at 39 Rue Descartes, Hemingway rented a top-floor, unheated room as “a writing aerie.” Gertrude Stein, who played den mother to the “lost generation” of American artists that Hemingway belonged to, lived at 27 Rue de Fleurus. To get there, head back to the Pantheon and set off through the Luxembourg Gardens. If you want to buy one of the small blue notebooks Hemingway used “when he wrote in the cafes,” take a slight detour to the Gilbert Jaune stationery store on the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
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