Jean Paul Sartre's favourite Paris cafe has been sold, but the ghosts of existentialism live on
France's best-known postwar literary cafe, the Flore in St Germain-des-Prés, has changed hands for more than £1.2m but the new proprietors have had to agree that it will remain a shrine for Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends. The former proprietor, Paul Boubal, now 74, is to keep his own table in the corner of the cafe on the Boulevard St Germain, retaining links with the days when Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir were among his regulars during and after the war.
The red moleskin seating and the 30s-style interior which Boubal installed when he took over in 1939 will be preserved, while visitors will still be able to sit at Sartre's corner table and use de Beauvoir's teapot.
Boubal, a round, shrewd man from the Auvergne, has himself become a monument in the quartier, while the price of the cafe's sale is an indication of the continuing profits St Germain-des-Prés makes out of the golden postwar period. Its new proprietor, Miroslav Siljegovic, already owns other Paris cafes, including Le Depart on the nearby Place de St Michel.
The Flore may be the last identifiable intellectual cafe in Paris in the traditions of Cafe de la Paix at the Opera or the cafes around Montmartre and Montparnasse. It began its rise to fame in the mid-30s when poet and scriptwriter Jacques Prévert gathered around him a group of dissident surrealists who shunned Montparnasse. During the war it became a casual recruiting centre for the French cinema and stage. Among those "spotted" there was Simone Signoret in 1942.
When Sartre moved from Montparnasse to a hotel in St Germain-des-Prés, he used the cafe to write in. "He came from opening time until midday and from the afternoon until closing," Boubal said. "I didn't know him by name, and he usually came with a woman who sat at another table in the corner."
The woman was de Beauvoir and during the afternoon the couple went to the room upstairs where "you would see them with huge files writing interminable articles".
It was not until months later when Sartre had completed his 350,000-word philosophical study L'Etre et le Néant and de Beauvoir published her first novel L'invitée, that he discovered their names. Later in the war, Sartre became so well known that a special phone line was installed for him, but when his popularity surged in 1946 and the bar became full of literary tourists he worked only from his flat in the Place de St Germain.
By then, Sartre and de Beauvoir were surrounded by friends who included Camus, then editor of the Combat newspaper, and Juliette Greco, who later became the best-known singer in St Germain-des-Prés's youth cult known as "existentialists" after Sartre's philosophy.
The Flore will continue to serve two of its specialities – boiled egg and bread and butter and Welsh rarebit with worcester sauce. The Flore's boiled egg – 25,000 are sold every year – is so much an institution that the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, another member of Sartre's group, commemorated it in a sculpture which he gave to Boubal.
This is an edited extract
0 comments:
Post a Comment