The Café du Dôme, Paris

 
André Kertesz, 1925, Le Café du Dôme, Paris.  

"Well, we'll meet again shan't we? Of course we shall. It would be a pity not to meet again, wouldn't it? Will I meet them at the Pékin tomorrow for lunch? I have an idea that I shan't be feeling much like Chinese food at half-past twelve tomorrow. We arrange to meet at the Dôme at four o'clock." (Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, p. 42)

What was the Dôme? Founded at the turn of the 20th century, this was the café most popular with the artists, writers, and intellectuals of the inter-war period -- Ernest Hemingway, Robert Capa, Pablo Picasso, Anaïs Nin, Man Ray, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, and so on. Also there: hangers-on who wanted to see the famous people. 

In Jean Rhys's 1937 novel Good Morning, Midnight, the narrator is an English woman who is staying temporarily in Paris at a rather seedy hotel. (Very similar in many respects to the central characters of the two earlier Jean Rhys novels I wrote about last week.) As she wanders around Paris, she remembers her life there quite a bit earlier, in the mid-1920s, and also experiences the Paris of the mid-1930s.

Her rather pathetic Paris wanderings often end up at the Dôme:

"I'm not going to any beastly little bar tonight. No, tonight I'm going somewhere where there's music; somewhere where I can be with a lot of people; somewhere where there's dancing. But where? By myself, where can I go? I'll have one more drink first and then think it out. 

"Not the Dôme, I'll avoid the damn Dôme. And of course it's the Dôme I go to. 

"The terrace is crowded, but there are not many people inside." (p. 65)

And later, she begins to talk to a man sitting at a table opposite to hers at the Dôme. She points out to him: "You want somebody very rich and very chick." He says "Yes, that's what would just suit me. And beautiful." And she answers: "But my dear, you're not going to find that at the Dôme." (p. 72) 

Good Morning Midnight makes reference to many other cafés and small restaurants in Paris, both in the narrator's 1930's frame story and in her flashbacks to her life in the 1920s. She mentions the Ritz Hotel (but never goes there), the Deux Magots. the Closerie de Lilas, the Select... many more. But somehow, she always comes back to the Dôme. (For a list of famous cafés during this era see: "The Lost Generation: Cafés in Paris.)

Eugene Atget, Café du Dôme, 1925.

Len and I ate breakfast at the Dôme a few years ago, when staying nearby.
Although the location and the decor are kept the same, the Dôme is now a very
high-priced seafood restaurant, not at all a meeting place for intellectuals.

In some ways, as I read Good Morning, Midnight, I felt as if I was reading yet another version of Jean Rhys's first two books. However, the character in this one is somewhat more developed and self-aware, despite being just as pathetic and helpless. Her constant need to ask for money, and to get people to buy her food, as well as to sympathize with her, is sad, and illustrates her desperate state. Sometimes her depression makes her not want food, though she manages to drink alcohol constantly. Sometimes in the flashbacks to earlier times she spent long times without a real meal, or she had to smuggle food into her hotel room when she had no money for a restaurant. Her hunger is often vividly described.

"I start thinking about food. Choucroute, for instance -- you ought to be able to get choucroute garnie here. Lovely sausage, lovely potato, lovely, lovely cabbage.... My mouth starts watering violently. I drink half the glass of Pernod in order to swallow convenablement." (p. 81)

"We go next door to a place called La Napolitaine and eat ravioli. Warming me. Eat slowly, make it last a long time... I've never been so happy in my life. I'm alive, eating ravioli and drinking wine. I've escaped. A door has opened and let me out into the sun. What more do I want. Anything might happen." (p. 118)

It's hard to describe the desperation of this character. And hard to read her very depressing story. Very different from the happy dreams and memories of Paris that are being shared this month at the blog event Paris in July. I'm also sharing all these beverage photos with the bloggers at Elizabeth's weekly blog party.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.