I’ve loved the Montparnasse area since I first stayed there as a guest in the incomparable Pension Les Marronniers, just opposite the southwest corner of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The area known as Montparnasse comprises parts of the fifth, sixth, fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements.

The last time I stayed there, a few years ago, it was summer and another pensionnaire and I would walk down the rue Vavin to the carrefour Vavin (Vavin crossroads) where the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail intersect. The cafés on and near this intersection have for the best part of a hundred years been a hub of  Parisian café society, patronized by students, artists, intellectuals and writers.  Near the carrefour my friend and I would see a film and then have a drink afterwards at la Coupole.

La Coupole is my favourite, and I cannot go there without remembering it’s the place where in 1940 Simone de Beauvoir worked on parts of her novel L’Invitee, or The Guest in English. Unsurprisingly, it was a favourite café of both her and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as of Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett.

Nearby Le Dome also claims de Beauvoir as a regular, and indeed she was born in an apartment in the building facing it, right on the corner of the two boulevards, and lived here there until the age of 11. In the first lines of the first volume of her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, de Beauvoir writes:

“I was born at four o’clock in the morning on the 9^th of January 1908 in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and overlooking the boulevard Raspail.” (p.5)

A few years later, in 1911, the bistro on the ground floor of the same apartment building, was bought by a Monsieur Victor Libion, and baptized La Rotonde. He little suspected at the time that his café would become one of the leading lights of Parisian life, according to the café’s own story of its history. According to this story, the artists of Montmartre descended upon it, and even Lenin and Trotsky held several meetings there. Simone de Beauvoir and her sister Louise were also said to have frequented it as teenagers.

La Coupole, too, did not yet exist at the time of de Beauvoir’s birth (it opened in 1927), something to which she also alludes in her memoir:

“In the boulevard Montparnasse, on the site where the Coupole now stands, was the Juglar coal depot out of which came black-faced men with coal sacks on their heads; among the piles of coke and anthracite, like the wisps of charred paper in the sooty limbo of a chimney…” (p.23)

Addresses : La Rotonde (est. 1911)  105 boulevard Montparnasse ; La Coupole (est. 1927)  102 boulevard Montparnasse ; Le Dôme (est. 1898)  108 boulevard Montparnasse.

Reference: de Beauvoir, Simone. (1959/2005). Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, New York: Harper Modern Classics.