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For 20 years or so, Montparnasse was the artistic and literary capital of the world, and then it disappeared. Its predecessor, Montmartre, is still on the tourist map, albeit as a parody of the place where Toulouse-Lautrec and Alfred Jarry used to work, but Montparnasse has been absorbed into the rest of the city almost without trace. There is even no sign of the hill from which it took its name.

The famous cafés, the Closerie de Lilas, the Dôme and the Rotonde, are still there, but only the names remain the same. Broad tree-lined boulevards of elegant apartment blocks run at acute angles into even broader tree-lined boulevards. Just like the rest of central Paris.

We had stayed the night in the Relais St Jacques in rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée, the kind of modest two-star hotel that the French still do really well, and the view of the Panthéon from our window was almost exactly the same as that in CRW Nevinson’s painting of Per Krohg’s studio in rue de Val de Grace.

A short walk up the boulevard St-Michel was the statue of Marshal Ney, which Brassai photographed on a foggy night and Ernest Hemingway sat beside in an early chapter of A Movable Feast. Next to it, the Lilas looked like a smart Kensington restaurant, its patch of pavement marked out by neat shrubs in rectangular pots. In 1910, when it was made famous by the poets Paul Fort and Guillaume Apollinaire, it was a workmen’s café and lunch cost 1.90 francs (about £2.50 in today’s money). Now the cheapest prix fixe is €42.69. Sasha, the down-at-heel heroine of Good Morning Midnight, used to drink here, and so did its author Jean Rhys, but they couldn’t afford it now.

We sat on the terrasse of the Rotonde, drinking espressos at €4.50 a time. In its great days from 1910-20, you could stay all evening for the price of one cup. If you fell asleep, the waiters were instructed not to wake you, and they weren’t put out by drunkenness and drug taking (hashish, opium and ether were the drugs of choice, defining Montparnasse much as absinthe used to define Montmartre). If there were fights, and there often were, the police were never called. If you couldn’t pay your bill, the proprietor, Victor Libion, would often accept a drawing.

In 1919, Thora Klinkowström, wife of the painter Nils Dardel, found it “a dirty stinking dive with sawdust on the floor and the worst kind of characters at every table”. But if you sat outside for an hour, you would see a dozen of the world’s greatest artists go past.

The English painter Nina Hamnett first came to Montparnasse in 1914 and on her first evening the man at the next table introduced himself as “Modigliani, painter and Jew”. When the Japanese painter Tsugugara Foujita arrived here in 1913, knowing nobody, he met Modigliani, Soutine, Pascin and Léger “practically the same night” and within a week knew Juan Gris, Picasso and Matisse.

Then, it was bohemia, a place that flourished in many cities in the 19th and early 20th century — in Schwabing in Munich; Montmartre, Montparnasse and later the Latin Quarter in Paris; Greenwich Village in New York; Chelsea, Fitzrovia and Soho in London — and now no longer exists anywhere. It was a place of cheap accommodation and cheap alcohol where unconventional behaviour was seldom censured, a community of free souls, far beyond the pale of respectable society.

The poet Max Jacob said he came to Montparnasse to “sin disgracefully”, but when he sat outside the Rotonde with Picasso and Jean Cocteau on August 12, 1916, he was on his best behaviour. He had not been entirely forgiven for his behaviour the year before, when he had arrived drunk at the funeral of Picasso’s lover Eva Gödel and attempted to seduce the driver of the hearse.

The others sitting outside the Rotonde that August afternoon were Picasso’s new girlfriend, fashion model Pâquerette, the painters Ortiz de Zárate and Marie Wasilieff and Henri-Pierre Roché, author of Jules et Jim. Later, they were joined by the painter Moïse Kisling, the critic André Salmon and Modigliani. The Mexican painter Diego Rivera said he would join them but never turned up.

Across the road, sometime around 1923, Ernest Hemingway stopped off at the Dôme after work and met the painter Jules Pascin and two models.

Now, the Rotonde has been smartened up like the Lilas and the Dôme, the menu offers ice-cream Coupe Modigliani, and you don’t see any great painters. It isn’t a place you’d want to start a fight in.

We sat for half an hour trying to imagine what it used to be like, but it wasn’t any good. Perhaps the past really is another country, and not one that can easily be reached by Eurostar.

But in the rougher streets to the south of the station, the impasse at 21 avenue du Maine was just as shabby as when Marie Wasilieff had her studio there. She was a nice painter and she looked after the impoverished colony of East European artists, turning her studio into a cheap canteen in the evenings. Dinner cost 80 centimes, coffee and wine 10 centimes extra. Her studio is now a small museum, and the Virginia creeper still grows in through the windows and sticks to the ceiling.

On show was a Cocteau exhibition, with all 21 of the photographs he took outside the Rotonde on August 12, 1916 ― Picasso dressed à l’Anglais with a flat cap, a cane and briar pipe, already well on the way towards respectability, Pâquerette wearing a long elegant dress and a very silly hat, and Wasilieff looking tiny and formidable. She was briefly the lover of Leon Trotsky and taught him to appreciate modern art.

It isn’t the kind of museum, like the Louvre, where you walk from one masterpiece to the next with hardly a glance. There is a real surprise and pleasure at finding yourself face to face with a Modigliani drawing or Kisling’s portrait of Cocteau. But it is just a museum, quiet and orderly, and it is hard to imagine that you are sharing the same space with what was once a noisy café, where Nina Hamnett danced naked just for the fun of it and a drunken Modigliani disrupted Bracque’s birthday dinner. Wasilieff, all of 5ft, pushed him downstairs while Picasso and Ortiz locked the door.

From there, we walked a long way further south in search of another relic of the old Montparnasse, just on the off-chance that it might still be there ― that it hadn’t fallen down or, like the old station that Giorgio de Chirico painted, fallen victim to the developers.

We went all the way down rue Falguière, past Parc Georges Brassens where the Villette slaughterhouse used to stand where Soutine used to buy the carcasses that he painted for weeks on end to the annoyance of his neighbours. And La Ruche was still there in the passage Danzig, an eccentric three-storey circular building like a large beehive, miraculously preserved. It had never been intended to last this long, nor had it ever been meant for human habitation, but few buildings have housed such a wealth of talent. For a time, it was home to Soutine, Ossip Zadkine, Hamnett, Kisling, Marc Chagall, Alexander Archipenko, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Jacob, Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, and possibly Modigliani and Brancusi as well as any number of drunks, misfits and chancers.

It had started life as the wine rotunda at the Great Exposition of 1900, designed by Gustave Eiffel. When the exposition ended, it was bought by Alfred Boucher, a successful sculptor of funeral ornaments, and re-erected on a piece of waste land as cheap studios for artists. The caryatids by the door were salvaged from the British India or possibly Indonesian pavilion, and the wrought-iron gates from the Pavilion for Women.

Zadkine described it as “a sinister brie cheese, where every artist had a piece; a studio which began at a point and ended in a large window”.

It was stifling in summer, freezing in winter, without gas, electricity, running water or proper insulation, overrun by rats and infested with lice and bedbugs, but it became a haven for penniless artists from all over Europe. The Russian painter Pinkus Krémègne arrived at the Gare de l’Est with three roubles in his pocket and the only French he knew was the phrase “Passage Danzig”. The rent was 37 francs a quarter and no one was evicted for non-payment, or for anything else. Soutine was a squatter and never paid anything.

La Ruche is still a collection of working studios. It isn’t a museum; it isn’t part of the heritage industry. The door won’t open for you, and there isn’t anything to do except stand at the gate and look. But for a moment as you peer through the railings, there is nothing to stop you imagining that you are back in 1920, and you get a sense of what Montparnasse was like in its great days.

We had lunch in a café just up the road on the south side of Place Charles Vallin where men chain-smoked Gauloises at the bar and photographs of old boxers hung on the wall beside the smoke-stained warning against public drunkenness. Marennes oysters cost €7.62 a dozen and the lavatory was as authentic as anyone could wish. There was no evidence that Modigliani or Hemingway had ever set foot in the place, but unlike the cafés in the boulevard Montparnasse it was somewhere they would have recognised.



The fatal march to the too predictable end of the road

Hemingway’s meeting with Pascin and the models is the crucial chapter of A Movable Feast, “The serious young writer and the friendly wise old painter and the two beautiful young girls with all of life before them.” Pascin was “a very good painter and he was drunk; steadily, purposefully drunk and making good sense”.

In recent years, Pascin’s reputation has declined (“What a ghastly painting,” was all Guardian critic Adrian Searle had to say about his Temples of Beauty in the Royal Academy’s recent Paris exhibition) and now he is possibly better known for the chapter in A Movable Feast than for all of his paintings. But he had a good sense of line and used wonderfully delicate, blurry colours. In the 1920s, he mostly painted bored, fragile petites filles, prostitutes waiting for clients, models waiting for the pose to end, in a style somewhere between Degas and Matisse. Behind the elegance lurked the terror of a damaged world.

“The two models were young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built, with a falsely fragile depravity. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way.” Although not named, Hemingway almost certainly meant two Dutch/Polish/Jewish sisters, Bronia and Tilya Perlmutter, although neither modelled regularly for Pascin, if ever. His words closely echo the description of Bronia (called Sari) also at the Dôme in Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together: “slight and beautifully formed, and full of an adolescent sullen vitality”.

“It is no fun to be 16 and to know too much about life,” she told him.

In A Movable Feast, Pascin offers the prettier sister to Hemingway, but she turns him down, saying he would be “too big”. The dialogue doesn’t convince ― it seems like wishful thinking on Hemingway’s part. She was then in love with Cocteau’s young protégé Raymond Radiguet and later married the film director René Clair.

But Hemingway could still write a fine sentence: “He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Döme.” No matter that Pascin always wore his hat tipped forward over his forehead.

In 1923, Pascin was already far advanced on what the critic Gaston Diehl later described as “the fatal march to the too predictable end of the road”. During the 20s, he began earning big money and he blew the lot. According to his biographer Georges Charensol, “Scarcely had he chosen his table at the Dôme or the Sélect than he would be surrounded by five or six friends; at nine o’clock, when we got up to dinner, we would be 20 in all, and later in the evening, when we decided to go up to Montmartre to Charlotte Gardelle’s or the Princess Marfa’s — where Pascin loved to take the place of the drummer in the jazz band — he had to provide for 10 taxis.”

When he killed himself, he was trapped in the role of the artist maudit and could no longer hack it, bored with his work, worn out by excess, broken down by alcohol ― “driven to the wall by his own legend” said Diehl.

On 2 June 1930, he cut his wrists and then his throat, and when that didn’t work, he hanged himself from the doorknob of his studio. It comes as a shock to learn that he was only 45. In the last photographs, he looked 70.

When Hemingway wrote A Movable Feast in 1960, he too was trapped in the impasse of his own legend — that of the macho adventurer — and he too could no longer hack it. A year later, he shot himself.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

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