Café des Amateurs

Café des Amateurs is presented as a squalid drinking house near Place de la Contrescarpe, a place the narrator avoids even as winter weather makes the surrounding quarter feel bleak and close. Its crowded, smoke-clouded interior and habitual drunkenness make it a grim counterpoint to the cafés where he can work or think; the comparison with the neighborhood’s cesspools gives the place its most forceful meaning.

Setting and Weather

The café comes into view with the first cold rains after autumn. Wind strips leaves from the trees on Place de la Contrescarpe, drives rain against the green bus at the terminal, and leaves the fallen foliage sodden. Inside Café des Amateurs, the windows mist from heat and smoke as customers crowd together. The contrast between the wet, dark street and the overheated interior does not make the café inviting: its warmth is inseparable from its stale air and the press of its clientele.

The narrator keeps away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sourness of drunkenness. In the same winter passage, he considers the cost and difficulty of heating his cold room, checks whether smoke is rising from nearby chimneys, and then walks through the rain rather than risk wasting fuel in a chimney that might not draw. His route eventually brings him to a café he knows on Place Saint-Michel. That alternative sharpens the distinction between Café des Amateurs and the kind of café in which he is willing to spend time.

Clientele and Drinking

The café’s customers are not occasional drinkers: the narrator describes men and women who remain drunk whenever they can afford to. Many buy wine by the half-liter or liter. Apéritifs are advertised, but few customers can afford them except as a preliminary drink before building up to wine. The account makes money part of the routine: drinking continues only as far as a customer’s means allow.

Women who drink heavily are called poivrottes, a word the narrator glosses as female rummies. The term marks the café’s habitual drinkers as a recognizable part of the quarter’s life, while the crowded room, cheap wine, and recurring intoxication give the place its collective character. Its patrons are described through the conditions that surround them, not as a gathering of distinct individuals.

The Cesspool Comparison

The narrator calls Café des Amateurs the cesspool of rue Mouffetard, the narrow, crowded market street leading into Place de la Contrescarpe. He develops the comparison through the actual sanitation system of the old apartment houses: squat toilets stood beside the stairs on each floor, and their contents were pumped at night into horse-drawn tank wagons. In summer, with the windows open, the pumping could be heard and its odor became strong. The brown-and-saffron wagons moving along Rue Cardinal Lemoine in moonlight seemed, in the narrator’s image, like paintings by Braque.

The difference is pointed: the apartment-house cesspools were emptied, but no one emptied the café. A yellowed notice listing the penalties for public drunkenness hangs there, flyblown and disregarded, while the customers remain constant and ill-smelling. The ignored poster turns the café’s disorder into more than a matter of unpleasant atmosphere: the law is visibly posted, yet has no apparent force in the room.

Narrative Significance

Café des Amateurs is a negative landmark in the narrator’s remembered Paris, registered through weather, smell, poverty, and the choice to walk elsewhere. The sanitation analogy connects the quarter’s physical infrastructure to the café’s social condition, but it also preserves a distinction between them: the city’s waste is periodically removed, whereas the café’s habitual drunkenness persists. In the winter scene, the narrator’s movement through rain ends not at this crowded bar but at a known café on Place Saint-Michel. That small act of avoidance makes the Amateurs a measure of the places from which his working life keeps its distance.