Along with the Dôme, the Rotonde and the Coupole, this café-restaurant in the Montparnasse district is famous for having been the HQ of artists and intellectuals in the Roaring Twenties. With its gourmet menu, its refined atmosphere and its beautiful green terrace, this establishment is today one of the most chic addresses in the capital.
Located around the Vavin crossroads in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, La Closerie des Lilas is today a must-see address in the capital. However, at the beginning, this place was mainly invested by the revellers going to or coming out of the Bal Bullier, high place of the night life of the 19th century and witness of many memorable evenings.
It was when artists began to meet in this modest guinguette used as a post house that its reputation emerged, especially in the early 1860s when the "intransigents" met there after leaving the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: the future impressionist painters (Bazille, Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro) became regulars and were followed, until today, by many other artists.
During the Roaring Twenties, the Closerie was one of the high points of the American intelligentsia: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, for example, had his manuscript of Gatsby the Magnificent read to Ernest Hemingway on the large terrace lined with lilacs.
There was no good café closer to home,
and it was one of the best cafés in Paris.
Poets (Eluard, Aragon, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Gautier), writers (Emile Zola, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide, Oscar Wilde, Beckett, the Goncourt brothers) or painters of modern art (Paul Cézanne, Picasso, Modigliani, Kees van Dongen...): artists and intellectuals have not stopped to follow one another at the tables of this one and a half century old HQ
Immortalized several times in the cinema (in Robert Enrico's Le Vieux Fusil and Édouard Baer's Adieu Paris, among others), the café also inspired Renaud to write the song "À la Close" and is, every year, the scene of a literary prize, the "incorrect book" prize, awarded to a French-language woman novelist.
Today, and since 1997, this legendary artistic-intellectual address belongs to the same owner as the Café de Flore, another site not to be missed if you want to follow in the footsteps of great minds in Paris.
Valerie from Comme des Français
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