Café de la Rotonde

Unlike many establishments in Montparnasse, La Rotonde has retained much of its bohemian charm and continues in operation to this day as a popular and chic spot for classic French cuisine lovers and the Parisian artistic intelligentsia.

[3] La Rotonde was frequented by Pablo Picasso[4] around the year 1914 as it was just down the street from his studio at 242 Boulevard Raspail, so he spent many days and nights there alongside his artist and poet friends that included Diego Rivera, Federico Cantú, Ilya Ehrenburg and Tsuguharu Foujita.

In the early years, proprietor Libion allowed starving artists to sit in his café for hours, nursing a ten-centime cup of coffee and looked the other way when they broke the ends from a baguette in the bread basket.

As such, there were times when the café's walls were littered with a collection of artworks, which today might fill curators of the world's greatest museums with envy.

No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde.” Billy Klüver's 1997 book, A Day with Picasso, is based on a group of photographs taken at lunch on a sunny afternoon at Café de la Rotonde in 1916 by Jean Cocteau, of Pablo Picasso and Modigliani and friends; including André Salmon, Max Jacob and Pâquerette, a model for the designer Paul Poiret.