Boulevard du Montparnasse

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Boulevard du Montparnasse

Most of the life the Montparnasse quartier is concentrated on boulevard du Montparnasse. The numerous cinemas here – six on the boulevard alone – are almost all of the multi-screen variety, specializing in mass-market French and U.S films. The liveliest point f the boulevard is around Vavin métro, where you’ll find Rodin’s Balzac ruminating over the crossroads, and a cluster of celebrated café’s: the Select, Coupole, Dôme and Rotonde. Their heyday was in the 1910s and 1920s, when artists and poets such as Apollinaire, Chagall, Leger, Modigliani, Picasso and Zadkine rubbed shoulders with exiled revolutionaries, including Lenin and Trotsky, paying a few centimes to occupy tables for hours on end. Even by the 1930s, the fashionable intelligentsias were moving in St-Germain, but the brasseries remain proudly Parisian classics – if no longer Bohemian haunts – and this stretch of the boulevard still stays up late.

Most of the cafés have moved up market, leaving only the Select as a traditional café. The swankiest literary relic by far, however, is the brasserie Closerie des Lilas, which sits on the corner of the three-lined avenue de l’ Observatoire. In the days when it was a cheap café, Hemingway wrote most of The Sun Also Rises here. The café’s most stirring historical association, however, is with Napoleon’s legendarily brave Marshal Ney, whose sword-wielding statue now marks the spot on the pavement where he died at the hands of a royalist firing squad.