Rue Delambre and the plaques of Gauguin, Breton, and Hemingway.
Paul Gauguin, André Breton, and Maurice Le Scouezec are just three famous celebrities who stayed in the Hotel Delambre in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. People know this by the three gold plaques, not on the façade, but in the entranceway hidden from view.
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) was a French Post-Impressionist artist, noted mostly for his colourful paintings that he created during the ten years he lived in Tahiti in French Polynesia (1891-1893 and 1895-1903). The gold plaque at the Hotel Delambe reads:
“In this hotel came, in 1891, the artist painter Paul Gauguin.”
Maurice Le Scouezec (1881-1940) was a French artist, engraver, illustrator, writer, soldier, sailor, and voyager. He worked with painters such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani. Le Scouezec is noted mostly for his paintings from his African visits. The gold plaque at the Hotel Delambe reads:
“The painter and writer Maurice Le Scouezec 1881-1940 lived in this hotel from 1917 to 1924.”
André Breton (1896-1966) was a Surrealist French writer and poet. He was noted for his 1924 book called Surrealist Manifesto. The gold plaque at the Hotel Delambe reads:
“In this hotel came in 1921 writer André Breton.”
Hotel Delambre is still operating today, located at 35 rue Delambre, near the Dingo Bar at 10 rue Delambre where James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway frequented in the Montparnasse area.
The Dingo Bar opened in 1923, but it is no longer operating as the original bar. In the location is the L’Auberge de Venise Italian restaurant, with its own gold plaque – this one is to notify people that Ernest Hemingway was indeed a local visitor to the Dingo Bar.
The gold plaque has a lengthy inscription in French. It reads:
Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
L’Auberge de Venise was previously the “DINGO American Bar and Restaurant,” one of the highest places of Parisian life in the crazy years. In 1924 Louis Wilson, a patron of the era of the DINGO Bar, found Jimmie Charters, a professional ex-boxer, always in a good mood. The arrival of Jimmie in the DINGO transformed the simple bar-restaurant into a place of obligatory passage of many writers and actors of the time. Here, even at your table (certainly more often at the bar!) came the biggest names of these years: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flossie Martin, and especially the best known of all, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Ernest Hemingway (to name but a few). It is also here, at the bar of the DINGO, that Ernest Hemingway concocted many cocktails for his friends, described in some of his novels, the best known being the “Long Island Iced Tea.”
