Café de la Paix

**Texts:** *My Old Man* by Ernest Hemingway and "The Absinthe Drinkers" by Robert Service. > "We'd sit at the Café de la Paix, my old man and me." Hemingway uses the café as a terrace of observation: racing talk, money worries, and father-son intimacy all pass across its tables. In Service's poem, the Café de la Paix terrace becomes a theatrical perch from which Parisian nightlife and obsession can be watched almost like a staged performance. Authors choose it because it sits at the intersection of spectacle and pause. It is public, fashionable, and highly visible, yet it also allows characters to watch the city while withholding themselves from it.

5 Place de l'Opéra, 75009 Paris, France