74 Rue de Cardinal Lemoine

Eighty-nine years on, it’s still easy to see what Hemingway loved at this place. It’s lunchtime, and the brasseries on the Place de la Contrescarpe have filled with diners, looking out at passersby as much as they look at them. It’s a sheltered little corner of Paris, with all the ingredients a shaltered corner in Paris should have. A boulangerie. A charcuterie. A market. A couple of bistros outlined by wicker chairs in red and tan and blue and black. A little garden sits at the center, where a woman sits and reads.

A moped passes by. A bicycle. A bubble-shaped delivery truck. Even here in the midst of the tourist-trodden Latin Quarter on Paris’s Left Bank, real life seems to go on, just as it must seem to have on a December day when Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley first dragged their trunks up the coiled stairway that led them to their third-floor apartment, a two-room cold-water flat with no toilet, but “ a fine view, a good mattress … and pictures we liked on the walls.”

If it doesn’t look exactly the way it looked when Hemingway was here, it mostly looks the way it could have looked when Hemingway was here, if you take away the Haagen-Dazs sign and the plaque marking it as Hemingway’s former home. The old nightclub downstairs is, fittingly, a bookstore – a quieter neighbor than it was in Hemingway’s day. The next-door herboristerie is a women’s clothing store, under the “Under Hemingway’s” sign.

A pair of young women in their 20s pass by, a Lonely Planet guidebook tucked under one of their arms. They snap a picture of themselves under 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine and slip away. Moments later, a group of tourists pass by, mostly gray-haired, rolling video of their tour guide. They vanish, too.

A splash of water at my feet shakes me back to the 21st century as the woman at the restaurant bside me tosses a bucket of soapy water on the sidewalk, maybe in part to chase away the neighbor’s cat, or to shoo me away. Hemingway’s good view was of a boucherie chevaline and a wine coop. Now it’s a couple restaurants.

“A Moroccan restaurant,” the man at Le Chalet de l’Olivier informs me as a poke my head in.

“Are you Moroccan?” I ask.

“Yes.”

That’s about as far as my French and his English get us. I thumb through my phrase book and in Franco-caveman say something like, “How old this restaurant?”

He shouts the question back into the kitchen. “One thousand nine hundred seven six,” he says, drawing each number in the air. “One nine seven six.”

In a city where time is marked by Roman numerals, one-nine-seven-six doesn’t seem so long, but they’ve been busy years in Paris, and they’ve brought changes Hemingway never could have dreamed of.

This entry was posted on June 7, 2010 at 5:01 pm and is filed under France. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.