By Thomas Shess. There are cafés that sell coffee, and there are cafés that sell permission. Les Deux Magots, on Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, has always belonged to the second category. The coffee is not the whole point. Neither is the famous terrace, the polished service, the old mirrors, the brass, the tabletops, or the long parade of people hoping to look as if they have arrived in a film that has not yet been made. The attraction is older and stranger than that.
We go to Les Deux Magots because it allows us to sit inside an idea. For the price of a coffee, a glass of wine, or a breakfast we may not remember in detail, we are handed a chair in the republic of thought. For an hour, we may imagine that conversation still matters, that literature still has a table, that art can still be argued into existence between the waiter’s return and the arrival of the bill. That is no small seduction.
The café began life long before its fame arrived. Its name comes from the two Chinese figures, the “magots,” that still watch over the room. Before the writers came, before the tourists came, before the cameras and guidebooks and pilgrimages, there was a shop, then a café, then a gathering place. Paris does this better than any city in the world. It allows commerce to become atmosphere, and atmosphere to become memory.
By the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Les Deux Magots had become one of those Left Bank addresses where the table could be as important as the desk. Poets came. Painters came. Novelists came. Philosophers came. Some were broke. Some were brilliant. Some were unbearable. A few were all three.
The guest list has become part of the wallpaper: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, André Gide, Jacques Prévert, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and others from the grand weather system of modern culture. Mentioning the names can feel like dropping coins into a fountain. One hopes for luck by association.
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| Paris, 1982 |
But fame alone does not explain the café’s hold on us. Many famous rooms grow cold. Many historic places become embalmed by their own reputation. Les Deux Magots remains attractive because it still performs a human service. It offers a stage without asking anyone to audition. Sit there long enough and you begin to understand the genius of the Paris café. It is public, but not impersonal. It is theatrical, but not quite false. It allows solitude and display to share the same chair. A person can read alone and still be seen. A couple can quarrel in whispers and still feel civilized. A visitor can pretend not to stare while staring at everyone. That is part of the magic.
We are not only drinking coffee.
We are studying the passing species.
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| Janet Flanner and Ernest Hemingway at the cafe shortly after the Nazi's had been driven from Paris, 1945 |
The writer at the next table may be answering email, not dashing off notes for a novel. The elegant woman in sunglasses may be waiting for an Uber, not a lover. The man with the scarf may be a professor, a banker, or a retired dentist from Cleveland. An American with his two sons: they look at Paris strolling by. He looks at his boys. They're here in Paris. A mental photograph that will last for a long time.It hardly matters. Les Deux Magots improves everyone slightly. It frames them. It gives each customer a little more silhouette than life usually permits.
And then there is the deeper appeal: continuity. In a world that discards almost everything, Les Deux Magots tells us that some places survive by refusing to hurry.
The waiters move with practiced indifference. The terrace faces the street as it always has, taking in the weather, the traffic, the changing shoes of civilization.
The café does not need to shout its importance. The room knows what it has seen. This is why literary cafés matter even to people who do not write. They remind us that thought once had a geography. Surrealism, existentialism, postwar argument, expatriate longing, private heartbreak, public arrogance, bad drafts, good sentences, love affairs, manifestos and unpaid bills all needed somewhere to land.
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| German soldiers enjoying Paris sidewalk cafes, 1941 |
Today, of course, the world has changed. The modern writer can work anywhere with Wi-Fi. Philosophy can be posted from an airport gate. Outrage needs no address. A laptop has replaced the cigarette, and the glowing screen has replaced the stare into the middle distance.
Still, we come.
We come because a famous café offers the ancient comfort of belonging to something we missed. Most of us were not there when Sartre argued, when Beauvoir observed, when Hemingway performed Hemingway, when Picasso walked through Paris as if the century had been expecting him.
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| American director John Huston, right, outside the cafe with Jose Ferrer and extras from the 1952 film "Moulin Rouge." |
But at Les Deux Magots, absence becomes rentable. We cannot enter the past, but we can sit near where it happened.
This is not foolish.
It is human.
A café is one of civilization’s most amazing inventions. It gives us a reason to pause without apology. It lets us be alone among others. It lets us watch life without having to explain ourselves. Churches have pews. Courts have benches. Cafés have chairs facing the street.
Les Deux Magots adds one more gift. It lets us believe, however briefly, that our own thoughts are part of a longer conversation. We may not write a novel there. We may not solve loneliness, art, politics, love or death over coffee. But we may feel, for one Paris hour, that such things are still worth discussing. That is what attracts us. Not simply the coffee. Not simply the legends. Not simply the famous dead.
We love Les Deux Magots because it keeps alive the romantic suspicion that a table, a cup, a street corner and a willing mind might still be enough to change the afternoon.
And sometimes, in Paris, the afternoon is all the immortality we need.
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*Footnote: A “magot” is a seated Chinese or Far Eastern figurine, often made of porcelain, used as a decorative object in Europe. Les Deux Magots takes its name from the two such figures that still overlook the café’s main room.
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