Café de la Rotonde

The café La Rotonde is a history of art and literature relevant Café and Restaurant ( French brasserie called ) in the Quartier Montparnasse in Paris. It is located at Carrefour Vavin, corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail Boulevard du Montparnasse with the address 105 in the 6th arrondissement and was opened in 1911 by Victor Libion ​​.

History

In an apartment of the building was 1908, the French writer Simone de Beauvoir to the world, where she spent ten years of her childhood. From 1910 many artists left their studios to the Montmartre - Pablo Picasso, for example, had given up his studio in the Bateau - Lavoir - and settled in the Quartier Montparnasse.

The owner of the café, Victor Libion ​​, had a heart for people living in poverty artists and writers who had a roof over their head hardly and little money for their meals. They were allowed to sit for hours with a cup of coffee for 10 centimes there. If they had no money to pay for their meals, he took her works on commission and gave it back to pay the bill. As a result, La Rotonde the venue for the works of famous artists today. In the present, hanging on the walls only copies, but they have a good mixture of different art directions.

Between the two world wars, here the members of the Surrealists such as André Breton, Max Ernst and Louis Aragon and American, at the time living in Paris, writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald met Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller were among the guests. In Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises ( Fiesta dt ) from 1926, the character Jake Barnes states: " No matter what cafe in Montparnasse you ask a taxi driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde. " (English as: " Ask a taxi driver to take a ride on the right bank across the river to a cafe in Montparnasse, he will always go to the Rotonde .") George Gershwin worked here in 1928 his composition An American in Paris.

In the 1924 novel, Les Montparnos the author Michel Georges- Michel leaves the protagonist, who represents Modigliani, statements about the Rotonde, "Who once, even if it has set for one day only, the foot in our Café, which is a infected once and for all with what we call the painter, plague of Montparnasse '. That's not syphilis or some other disease - you will notice yourself - but much worse. , A not -to-control epidemic-like longing for this place, which is at the moment one of the most interesting on the globe "