In the eighteenth century, the pile of earth excavated from the Denfert-Rochereau quarries, on what is now the corner of boulevard du Montparnasse and boulevard Raspail, was named Mont Parnasse (Mount Parnassus) by drunken students, who liked to declaim poetry from the top of it. The area, today Montparnasse , stretching from the railway station to the Observatoire, was to keep its associations with art, bohemia and intellectualism, attracting the likes of Verlaine and Baudelaire in the nineteenth century, and Trotsky, Picasso, Man Ray, Chagall, Hemingway, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the twentieth. They frequented the brasseries on the boulevard du Montparnasse , and many of them found their final resting-place in the Montparnasse cemetery , just south of the boulevard. Casting its shadow over the whole area is the skyscraping black Tour Montparnasse . Full of offices, and located between the train station and a large shopping centre, it forms a pivotal point for much of the activity in Montparnasse today.

 

The Montparnasse quartier divides the lands of the well-heeled opinion-formers and power-brokers of St-Germain and the 7e from the amorphous populations of the three southern arrondissements , the 13e, 14e and 15e. Unsightly, modern constructions have scarred some parts of this southern side of the city, but new spaces have also opened up, and some of the smaller-scale developments are delightful. Some pockets have been allowed to evolve in a happily patchy way - Pernety and Plaisance in the 14e, the rue du Commerce in the 15e, and the Butte-aux-Cailles quartier in the 13e. These are genuinely pleasant places to explore, well off the tourist track.