Les Deux Magots

Before becoming a café it was a silk and novelty shop named after a play about two Chinese merchants; the two wooden figures, the «magots», still preside over the room. It became a café in 1885, facing Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest church in Paris.

Verlaine and Rimbaud came here, and in the 20th century Hemingway, Picasso, André Breton and the Surrealists, Sartre and Beauvoir. Since 1933 it has awarded the Prix des Deux Magots, one of France's oldest literary prizes.