TRAVELING IN STYLE : CORRESPONDENTS’ CHOICE : HISTORICAL HANGOUTS

Five Times correspondents from around the world offer thumbnail sketches, from cities they have covered, of places where people gather and memorable things happen.

PLACE DE LA CONTRESCARPE, Paris

NEAR THE TOP OF MONTAGNE SAINTE-GENEVIEVE, EAST of the the Pantheon in the Left Bank student quarter of Paris, is the Place de la Contrescarpe, which was, among other things, Ernest Hemingway’s first home in Paris. It was just off this tiny square, in 1922, that Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, took their first Parisian apartment, a fourth-floor flat in a modest building at 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine.

Here the newlyweds shared a Turkish-style hallway toilet with their neighbors. The building was next to a noisy bal musette --a dance hall that played accordion music into the wee hours. The main bar on the square was “a sad, evilly run cafe where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together.”

Yet the square played an important role in several of Hemingway’s books: The bal musette appears in “The Sun Also Rises”; the neighborhood is recalled by the dying writer (and Hemingway alter ego), Harry, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as the place he loved best in all Paris.

Today, not even a plaque calls attention to the apartment on Rue du Cardinal Lemoine or to Hemingway’s nearby studio at 39 Rue Descartes, where the poet Paul Verlaine died in 1897.

In recent years, the Place de la Contrescarpe has been cleaned up, gentrified and, along with the adjacent Rue Mouffetard, turned into one of the most pleasant neighborhoods on the Left Bank. The square has a fountain, four struggling catalpa trees and several attractive cafes where visitors can order, in honor of Hemingway, a cafe creme or a big, cold beer.