Haunted by Hemingway in Paris

France's capital loves writers, says Adrian Mourby. The feeling's mutual

Hemingway called Paris his "moveable feast" and informed fellow writer F Scott Fitzgerald that if you couldn't write here, you'd never write anywhere. He loved it, even during the first cold rains of autumn, "when there were no more tops to the high white houses ... but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops".

Thankfully, there have always been warm cafés in Paris, and it was for the solitude of these that Hemingway left his wife Hadley and baby son every morning. Cafés such as Les Deux Magots, in St Germain des Prés where I'm sitting now.

With its leather benches, school desktop tables and silent waiters, Les Magots has an air somewhere between gentlemen's club and chic private library. Long gone are the days when the café's twin magots (statues of Chinese merchants) looked down upon Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but the literary couple's names are commemorated on brass plaques behind the seats they liked to occupy, as indeed is Hemingway's.

Nowadays this café seems to be the preferred meeting place of book publishers, treating their editors to a power petit déjeuner. Even so, the atmosphere remains calmly introspective. You can see why Hem liked to sit here: no one expects you to move on. No wonder he would wake early, prepare a bottle for Mr Bumby, and then leave Hadley in their depressing flat in the fifth arrondissement.

The Left Bank has come a long way since 1922 when Ernest and Hadley arrived here seeking creativity, kindred spirits and, in Hemingway's case, spirits of a more toxic nature, but the fifth has not been gentrified to the extent that the sixth has: it remains tatty and boarded up in places. I went up to rue Cardinal Lemoine in the morning mist. It remains a bleak, angular hilltop and I can't help but think admiringly of the loyal Hadley, stuck up there on the third floor of number 74. There's a travel agent on the ground floor of 74 these days. Vacations Nomades sports a blue street sign that reads "Under Hemingway's".

But it is down here in the sixth arrondissement where Ernest was most at home. In 1922 Les Deux Magots was a scruffy café opposite Paris's oldest church, St Germain des Prés, and here he would sit reading, rewriting and occasionally allowing himself to be distracted by attractive young women.

I walked 500 yards down the busy Boulevard St Germain to 12 rue Odéon, where in Hemingway's time Sylvia Beach ran a bookshop called Shakespeare and Co. Hem often visited her premises to borrow from her library. Rue Odéon is much more chic these days. One could spend a morning browsing its boutiques. There are still a few genuine bookshops but 12 rue Odéon is now Ann Gérard Créations, a designer jewellery store. A plaque on the first floor of this block declares, "En 1922 dans cette maison Mlle Sylvia Beach publia Ulysses." Miss Beach didn't just lend her authors books, she also published Joyce when no reputable publisher would.

From Odéon I took the metro to Vavin. Hem would have walked. He believed it was important to exercise if one was to write. A walk to his other beloved bar, La Closerie des Lilas, might be a good idea but I would have missed le bar à huîtres, an unpretentious oyster stall on the corner of Montparnasse and Raspail which sold me three delicious monsters. The young man serving was very friendly and even came after me to ask whether something written on the bank note I'd given him was of importance. Writers really do get looked after in Paris.

La Closerie is at the junction of Montparnasse and rue du Départ, just behind a large illuminated statue of Marshal Ney, which Hem referred to as "my old friend". La Closerie today is not the place it was when Hemingway sat there to write most of The Sun Also Rises. Dark and expensive, it suffers from a surfeit of chic. Hem became a regular at La Closerie after returning from Spain with Hadley in 1923. The couple's new home was not far from Vavin at 113 Notre Dame des Champs, this time above a saw mill.

For a more cheerful insight into Hemingway's Paris I boarded the metro at St Placide and travelled up to Opéra. Just round the corner from Palais Garnier there was an excellent New York Bar, Harry's. Sank Roo Doe Noo (5 rue Danon) is typical of the kind of drinking establishment he enjoyed. Service is relaxed here, much more in keeping with the clientele, a noisy bunch of young Americans.

There wasn't much left on my Hemingway trail, unless I wanted to go to the Ritz where he holed up at the end of the Second World War. But that was with another wife and, maybe, less honesty than when he first set out to write one true sentence in the cafés of Paris. That Paris would remain within the heart of Hemingway for the rest of his life.

A three-night break with Cresta (0870 161 0915; www.crestaholidays.co.uk) costs £247 per person, based on two sharing, including return flights or Eurostar and b&b in the three-star Timotel Elysées. For further information about Paris contact the French Tourist Office (0906 8244123, calls cost 60p per minute; www.franceguide.com).