Jardin du Luxembourg - The Medici Fountain (1630)

From the Jardins du Luxembourg to Saint-Sulpice – A virtual walk through the Odéon district of Left-Bank Paris

with Chris Boïcos

For our first virtual walk in Left-Bank Paris we will cover one of the most historic districts of the city but also one that represents the heart of Paris literary and cultural life of the 1920s and 1930s.

We begin in the gardens of the royal palace of Luxembourg built for Marie de Medici in the 1620s and continue into the district immediately to the north that has a wealth of prestigious 18th century hotels-particuliers and important neo-classical monuments like the Ecole de Chirurgie, the Odéon theater, the façade of St Sulpice and the first Paris apartment buildings from the time of Louis XVI. We will also see the site of the famous bookshop in which the American and British “Lost Generation” gathered in post-WWI Paris: Sylvia Beach’s “Shakespeare & Company,” as well as the hotels, cafés and houses frequented by the likes of Djuna Barnes, Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Beech’s girlfriend, the bookseller Adrienne Monnier, and French writers Paul Valéry, André Gide, Jacques Prévert and many more.

Period paintings and photographs will supplement and enrich our walk of the neighborhood.