At The Cafe de Flore. From one icon of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, pictured below, to another landmark, the Café de Flore. You just can’t go to Paris without stopping there for a drink, a coffee, a cup of tea or a little snack, it’s de rigueur! The clients are a subtle mix of artists, writers, intellectuals, reporters, politics, designers, It was there that Appollinaire coined the word “surrealism”, it was there that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir invented “existentialism”. De Beauvoir recalls “We installed ourselves completely: from 9 to 12 am, we worked, then we had lunch, and at 2 pm we came back and spoke with friends we had met, until 8pm. After having dinner, we received people with whom we had fixed an appointment. This could seem strange to you, but at this café we were at home.” In the ‘60s the cinema seized the café: Roger Vadim, Jane Fonda, Roman Polansky, Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, as well as, the intelligentsia of the times: Sagan, Barthes and the world of fashion: Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Karl Lagerfeld and the most beautiful models. The American Cinema likes to go there too: Sharon Stone likes to sip Champagne, Robert de Niro, likes to people watch, Jack Nicholson enjoys a cigar. But the Flore, is first of all a literary Café where writers of yesterday and of nowadays gather. Sitting next to us, as you can see by the manuscript on the table, were French author Fred Pages going over his new novel with his publisher Maren of Maren Sell Editeurs.
