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vivid time to look from one side to the other and say to himself, as the cold came up from the river, Gide was here on Thursday and on Monday Joyce was there.
    ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, quoted in Paris in the Twenties by Armand Lanoux
    A nyone who lives in Paris ends up spending a lot of time walking. That’s particularly true if you live, as we do, in the sixth of its twenty arrondissements , or municipalities.
    The sixth, or sixième , is Paris’s Greenwich Village or Soho. Historical and literary associations don’t simply litter the streets; one has to climb over them. Between 1918 and 1935, you might, standing on the corner of rue Bonaparte and boulevard Saint-Germain, with the Deux Magots café at your back, have encountered Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, William Faulkner, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, James Joyce, William Faulkner, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and scores more. Today, it’s the most expensive district of the city. A square meter of floor space, the area covered by a single armchair, costs $15,000, but in 1922, as Hemingway wrote in Esquire , you could live here for a year, rent, food, and drink included, for $1,000.
    Hemingway came to Paris briefly as a wounded veteran in 1918, returned as a reporter for Canadian newspapers in 1921, and lived at a number of addresses on the Left Bank for seven years, writing the novels and short stories that established his reputation. He often visited our building and ate at the same restaurants where we still eat today. We even knew a few of the same people. No wonder I was taken with the sixth.

    Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare and Company
    Like everyone, I’d been seduced by A Moveable Feast and its picture of a bohemian paradise, inhabited by a handful of charmed foreigners whom the locals—those few who got a mention, mostly barmen and whores—held in awed respect. Reading Henry Miller’s memoirs, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company , Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris , and Memoirs of Montparnasse by another Canadian, John Glassco, you could almost believe only expatriates lived there . They casually referred to the sixième as “the Quarter,” almost as if a wall surrounded it, within which, as with Jean Gabin in the casbah of Algiers in Pépé le Moko and Charles Boyer in its U.S. remake, Algiers , normal laws didn’t apply .
    Most of these memoirs were written thirty years later, following a second world war. Distance lent enchantment. Looked at from postwar Europe, impoverished and split by political disputes, it was too easy for Beach, Miller, and in particular Hemingway to believe the sun had been warmer back then, the conversation wittier, the drinks more potent, the women more beautiful, the city cleaner, more honest, more innocent. “When spring came,” wrote Hemingway, “even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people, and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness, except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
    The opinion of those “very few” mattered a great deal. When Scott Fitzgerald behaved badly at the Antibes home of his rich friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, they formally barred him for a week. It was bad enough that they specified the period of exile, like grounding a teenager, but worse that Fitzgerald, when his sentence ended, slunk back into their circle.
    Or take the famous incident of Hemingway “liberating” Odéon.
    In July 1944, Paris, abandoned by the Germans, had not yet been claimed by the advancing Allies, who’d held back to let the French march in first with Charles de Gaulle leading the parade down the Champs-Elysées. As his entourage passed through Montparnasse, writer Leon Edel noted the damage done to its famous cafés, the Dôme, La