Closerie des Lilas

Closerie des Lilas is both a neighborhood café and a recurring point of orientation in Ernest Hemingway’s recollection of Paris. Near the family’s flat over a sawmill, it offers a place to work, meet friends, watch the passing city, and return to domestic life. Its significance lies less in a single dramatic episode than in those repeated uses: the café becomes a steady coordinate in a life governed by writing, money, weather, and movement through the streets.

Setting and Social Character

When the Hemingway family lived at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Closerie des Lilas was the nearest good café, and Hemingway considered it one of the best in Paris. In winter it was warm inside; in spring and fall, the tables beneath the trees beside the statue of Marshal Ney and the square tables under the large boulevard awnings made its outdoor setting especially inviting. Two waiters were friends of the family, giving the café the character of a familiar local place rather than an anonymous establishment.

The Lilas also had a distinct social identity among the cafés of Montparnasse. People from Le Dôme and La Rotonde did not come there; they had no acquaintances at the Lilas, and Hemingway suggests that no one would have stared at them if they had. Other cafés at the corner of Boulevard Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail attracted people who wanted to be seen in public, places that seemed to offer a daily substitute for lasting fame. The Lilas, by contrast, was not defined by display. Its regular company included elderly, bearded men in worn clothes, often accompanied by wives or mistresses. Some wore thin red Legion of Honor ribbons; others had the purple Palms of the Academy. Hemingway and Hadley guessed that these clients might be scientists, scholars, professors, or instructors, but the scene is presented through their tentative impressions, not certain identifications.

The café had once been a regular meeting place for poets, with Paul Fort described as its last principal poet. Hemingway had never read Fort. The only poet he recalls seeing there was Blaise Cendrars, whose broken boxer’s face and pinned-up empty sleeve distinguished him in the room. Cendrars could be good company until he drank too much; when he lied, Hemingway found him more interesting than many truthful storytellers. The recollection preserves both the café’s literary past and the smallness of its actual literary scene: Cendrars appeared only once in Hemingway’s memory.

Walking Routes and the River

The Lilas belongs to a larger geography of purposeful walking. Hemingway describes several ways to reach the Seine from the top of rue Cardinal Lemoine. The shortest route ran straight down the steep street, across the busy beginning of Boulevard Saint-Germain, and out beside the bleak, windy riverbank and the Halle aux Vins, a bonded wine warehouse. Across a branch of the Seine stood Île Saint-Louis; walking along the quais brought Notre-Dame and Île de la Cité into view. These details place the café within a city encountered on foot, through changing streets and working districts rather than as a static backdrop.

Walking also served as a way to think. After finishing work, or when trying to resolve a problem, Hemingway followed the quais and watched people doing things they understood. At the point of Île de la Cité below Pont Neuf, chestnut trees shaded a small park where fishermen worked the changing currents with long cane poles, fine leaders, light tackle, and quill floats. They caught goujon, fish Hemingway describes as sweet-fleshed and often eaten whole. He sometimes bought wine, bread, and sausage, sat in the sun with a book, and watched the fishing. He did not fish himself: he lacked the tackle, preferred to save his money for fishing in Spain, and could not predict when work or travel would take him away. The contrast between close observation and deliberate nonparticipation makes the walk part of his working life, not simply recreation.

A Place to Work

The route to Closerie des Lilas could lead directly into composition. After paying a bill, Hemingway crossed rue de Rennes and avoided going to Deux-Magots for coffee, then walked by rue Bonaparte, Guynemer, rue d’Assas, and rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs toward the Lilas. He was asking himself what he knew best and cared for most, material he had not already written about and lost. At the café he sat in a corner with afternoon light over his shoulder, wrote in a notebook, and drank half a café crème after it cooled. The story he began concerned a return from war, yet made no mention of the war. He did not want to leave the imagined river and trout in the pool; the next morning, he would have to make the river, the country, and what happened there through the work of writing.

This scene gives the café a precise creative function. It is not represented as the source of inspiration by itself: Hemingway arrives after walking and thinking, and the notebook, the cooling coffee, and the hours of continued work establish the discipline that turns observation into fiction. The café’s familiar routine creates a place to begin, while the story’s absent war shows how much can be carried by implication rather than directly named.

Encounters, Return, and Memory

The Lilas also gathers episodes of friendship and changing attachments. After an evening reflection on Gertrude Stein’s description of the young as a lost generation, Hemingway stopped at the café to keep the statue of Marshal Ney company and drank a cold beer. He thought of Stein’s warmth and her appreciation of Apollinaire, while rejecting the ease of labels such as lost generation. When he reached the family courtyard, he found Hadley, their son Bumby, the cat F. Puss, and a fire; he told Hadley that Gertrude was nice, anyway. The movement from the café and its solitary statue to a warm family room makes the Lilas a passage between public thought and domestic affection.

The café recurs after Hemingway’s difficult trip with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Once he had left Fitzgerald at home and taken a taxi back to the sawmill, he joined Hadley at the Lilas for a drink. They were happy to be together again, like children reunited after a separation, and he told her about the journey. The return gives the café another role: it is a familiar setting in which experience away from home can be recounted and shared.

By the memoir’s account of Paris, Closerie des Lilas holds together the city’s particular routes, Hemingway’s working habits, and his closest daily relationships. Its rooms and terrace do not stand outside the pressures of poverty, travel, or change. Instead, its meaning accumulates through repeated visits: a corner table and notebook, a beer beside Ney’s statue, friends at the terrace, and a drink with Hadley after a journey. The café becomes memorable because it repeatedly receives the narrator back.