Struggling to make a living writing after being booted out of the house by his mother, Ernest Hemingway met the charming Elizabeth Hadley Richardson in Chicago. They were married in 1921, and promptly moved to Paris: the City of Light, of artists, of exiles, of lovers -- "the city I love best in all the world," Ernest Hemingway declared.
"There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other," Hemingway wrote of the city he called home for seven years. "We always returned to it ... Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy."
The legacy of the Hemingways -- and the Fitzgeralds, Henry Miller, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach ... the list goes on -- can be found all over Paris.
The Hemingways' first apartment was a 4th floor walkup at 74 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine "that had no hot water or inside toilet," Hemingway wrote. Around the corner from their apartment was the writer's studio, an attic room at 39 rue Descartes. And Hemingway called La Closerie des Lilas at 171 Boulevard du Montparnasse "the nearest good cafe when we lived in the flat over the sawmill at 113 Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and one of the best cafes in Paris."
Ernest and Hadley divorced six years after their marriage. But their life together in Paris, detailed in 1959's "A Moveable Feast," left Hemingway with some of his most treasured memories.
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