Paris - Montparnasse

The Montparnasse quarter of Paris is now almost more celebrated for the 59 story Tour Maine- Montparnasse than for the old artists' colonies whose last remnants have survived in the southern part of the 14th arrondissement.

While between the turn of the century and the First World War Montmartre and in the decade following the Second World War Saint-Germain-des-Prés were the haunt of artists and intellectuals, this role fell during the 20s and 30s to Montparnasse.

Among the habitués of the cafes, bars and restaurants at the intersection of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail - the Dôme, the Coupole, the Select, the Rotonde - were Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and James Joyce. Here too were the studios of Matisse, Kandinsky, Modigliani and Chagall. The cafe-restaurant Closerie des Lilas was the domain of the poets Paul Fort and Guillaume Apollinaire, and Jean- Paul Sartre was a regular customer.