Monday, August 25, 2008

See Paris as a writer

Do you want to walk through history and have fun at the same time... Well take your firiend Ernest Hemingway, and you can walk in the writer's footsteps through two neighborhoods on the Left Bank of the Seine - the 5th and 6th arrondissements. Just remember to bring all your EUROS.That includes occasional stops for nourishment and refreshment - just as Hemingway would have done.

There's no set path or order of stops. Get a good map, a few Metro tickets, and create your own Tour de Paris.
From 1921 to 1928, Hemingway prowled these neighborhoods, making his slow climb from promising young writer to acclaimed author. He wrote in the cafes, ate in the bistros, drank in the bars, and when you see one of those that looks inviting, chances are Hemingway thought so, too. Bring plenty of books..maybe you read as a pose to write.
In your travels..You can start at the Pantheon, the shrine to great citizens of France and the resting place of many of them. It is a gloomy building in general, but if you like the Foucault pendulum at the Franklin Institute, check out the one in the Pantheon, which Leon Foucault hung himself in 1851.
Behind the Pantheon, wind your way through narrow streets to the Place de la Contrescarpe, a tidy square bordered by cafes and shops. A few steps off the plaza is 74 Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, where Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, had their first apartment - a third-floor, cold-water walk-up that doesn't look much better now.
When they lived there, a ballet school and dance club was on the ground floor, a setting Hemingway copied in "The Sun Also Rises." He and Hadley were so poor that the family cat often served as a babysitter, yet Hemingway found the money to also rent a top-floor, unheated room around the corner at 39 Rue Descartes to use as a writing aerie.
The neighborhood was dismal then, and even Hemingway avoided the Cafe des Amateurs, a seedy spot he referred to as "the cesspool of the Rue Mouffetard." Today, it is a bright, inviting place called the Cafe Delmas, where you can sit at a sidewalk table, drink a Belgian beer, and watch the world stroll past, as it has been doing for quite some time. The Mouffetard, a narrow, winding street lined with every imaginable shop, was the beginnings of the Roman road from Paris to Lyon. Remember ...bring your Euros..all is expensive..except the memories.

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