Patrick Comerford
One night last week, after strolling around the Left Bank and the Latin Quarter in Paris for an hour or two after dinner, we ended up sipping drinks at Les Deux Magots, the celebrated literary café and restaurant at 6 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 6th arrondissement.
We sat for a while at a table facing onto the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, across from the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the sixth century church that is one of the oldest in Paris and that gives its name to this quarter.
The cafés in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter include Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, the Brasserie Lipp and le Procope, which we had visited earlier that day. There are many bookshops and publishing houses in the area, and – as the street sign near our table reminded us – in the 1940s and 1950s, this was the centre of the existentialist movement associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1902-1986).
If Le Procope claims to be the oldest café in Paris, then Les Deux Magots earned its reputation as the rendezvous of the city’s literary and intellectual elite. It is now a popular tourist destination, but its reputation comes from the patronage of writers, artists, intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and writers such as James Joyce, George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway.
Other patrons included Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, Bertolt Brecht, Julia Child and the American writers James Baldwin, Chester Himes and Richard Wright.
When James Joyce was interviewed by Djuna Barnes for Vanity Fair in Les Deux Magots in 1922, he ordered a glass of white wine. In 1948, George Orwell thought he remembered seeing James Joyce in Les Deux Magots 20 years earlier in 1928, ‘but I’ve never quite been able to swear to that because J. was not of very distinctive appearance.’
James Joyce refers to the café in Finnegans Wake (1939), it is referred to by Vladimir Nabokov in
Since the beginning, Café Deux Magots has been the favourite haunt of artists and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Fernand Léger, Jacques Prévert and Ernest Hemingway.
It was there that many literary and artistic movements were conceived and nurtured, such as the surrealism of André Breton and the ideas of existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
The word magot is said to mean ‘stocky figurine from the Far East.’ The name originally belonged to a silk and novelty shop nearby at 23 rue de Buci. The shop was there from 1812, and took its name from a popular play of the 19th century, Les Deux Magots de la Chine. Two statues representing Chinese ‘mandarins’, or ‘magicians’, or alchemists, gazed down over the room.
The shop was moved to place Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Boulevard Saint Germain, opposite the church, in 1873, so that the business could expand. It gave way in 1884 to a café and bar under the name brought from rue de Buci. Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and other writers then became regular habitués, meeting there in the midst of absinth vapours and cigar smoke.
The business was on the brink of bankruptcy when Auguste Boulay bought it in 1914 for 400,000 francs. He made it more brightly lit and welcoming, attracting Guillaume Apollinaire and his friends. But the statues of the two magots have remained the same ever since the café opened.
The café enhanced its role in Parisian cultural and literary life with the creation of the Prix des Deux Magots in 1933. Raymond Queneau was the first recipient and the literary prize has been awarded to a French novel each year since.
In the 1950s, you could have listented to Boris Vian play his trumpet, while Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sat at a table where she worked on her novel Les Mandarins, which received the Goncourt Prize in 1954, or as Ernest Hemingway was smoking a cigar at the end of the room.
The café became a favourite location and background for films in the 1970s, including the comedy The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob and the cult film La Maman et la Putain.
When the Mathivat family became involved in the café in 1985, they developed the restaurant. Catherine Mathivat, a great-great-granddaughter of Auguste Boulay, started to work in the café in 1993. When her father died in 2012, she became the fourth-generation owner and was determined to breathe new life into the café.
When a study showed that 60% of the clientele were international tourists, Catherine Mathivat and her cousin Jacques Vergnaud began working to redesign the café and to reclaim its Parisian clientele.
There are cafés with the name and brand of Les Deux Magots in Riyadh, Tokyo and São Paulo, and there are plans to bring this unique French brand and a taste of Parisian life to Cape Town, Prague, London and Guangzhou. But the café in Paris is the flagship and a recent report shows the café in Saint-Germain alone has an annual revenue of €15 million.
Les Deux Magots remains an exciting creative and cultural crossroads in French life, drawing celebrities from the arts, and the literary, fashion and political worlds, as well as tourists who come to savour an authentic slice of Paris.
It was still a week time before Lent, and it was not yet Saint Valentine’s Day. But it was a delayed honeymoon of sorts. So we lingered a little longer, savouring the literay legacy and imagined the wroters and philosophers who had been here before us. I enjoyed a glass of red wine rather than joining James Joyce in that glass of white wine over a century ago. We stepped inside to see the original figures who give their name to Les Deux Magots, still perched on the wall overseeing the evening conversations, before strolling back to our hotel.
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