Les Deux Magots
Les Deux Magots ( French for “the two traders”, from “magot” = money, trader from the Far East, figure) is a famous Parisian café and eatery in the St. Germain-des-Prés district on Boulevard Saint-Germain - corner of Platz St.-Germain-des-Prés (Address: 6 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, F-75006 Paris). Its fame derives from encounters between famous writers , intellectuals and artists who first chose it as their meeting place in 1885, then in the 1920s and 1930s, and later again in the early 1950s.
History and guests
The Café Les Deux Magots , whose name means "The Two Merchants" (of Chinese origin) and whose wooden, almost life-size and elaborately designed seating figures adorn the café's guest room, is derived from a trading post for Far Eastern (mainly Chinese) news and arts and crafts from the year 1812, which in 1873 moved from Bucistraße 23 (Rue de Buci) to Saint-Germain-des-Prés-Platz 6 due to lack of space. The two seated figures mentioned come from this time. Around 1885 the warehouse was converted into a café and liquor store while retaining the company emblem with the name Aux Deux Magots , named after the two grotesque Chinese porcelain figures "magota". Poets and writers of the time such as Paul Verlaine , Arthur Rimbaud , Stéphane Mallarmé , Oscar Wilde and others met there and gave the restaurant its first celebrity. The reputation of the Deux Magots continued through surrealist artists like André Breton , who chose it as their meeting place, later also through intellectuals like André Gide , Jean Giraudoux , Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and visual artists like Fernand Léger who came here were frequently encountered. Often guests were Ernest Hemingway , Albert Camus and the painter Pablo Picasso , later also the director François Truffaut , the guitarist Bob Welch and the Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco .
After the café established its reputation, it was mostly visited by tourists who believed they were witnessing an authentic bohemian atmosphere while the real scene quickly shifted to other locations. Today it plays an important role in the cultural life of Paris, which is underlined by the annual award of its own Deux Magots literary prize ( Prix des Deux Magots ) created in 1933 for outstanding French writers. In 1933, Raymond Queneau was the first to be awarded a prize for his novel Le chiendent ( Eng : The Dog's Tooth ).
In 1914 it was bought by Auguste Boulay and since 1919 it has been owned by the Mathivat family. Among them was the well-known bridge construction engineer Jacques Mathivat , who headed it from 1985 and transferred the concept to Tokyo (in the Bunkamura cultural center) in 1989, including the literature prize. Catherine Mathivat has headed the Deux Magots since 1993.
See also
Web links
Coordinates: 48 ° 51 ' N , 2 ° 20' E