If you were asked to picture life as an expatriate in Paris, your mind is likely to drift to one of two images, at once similar and radically different. The first is literary squalor — the starving artist — as depicted in books such as George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The second is the cafe society associated with figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Straddling both categories is the quintessential Parisian literary expatriate, Ernest Hemingway. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes of walking around Paris with an empty stomach and a head full of ideas, resembling the nameless narrator of the 1890 novel Hunger by Knut Hamsun, whom Hemingway says “taught me to write.”
Before becoming the starving flaneur, Hemingway was the Paris correspondent for the Toronto Star newspaper, a position to which he was appointed at the ripe old age of 22. Hemingway’s articles of this period — written in the Star’s lean, declarative style, which would come to characterize the American’s fiction — are highly revealing of life in Paris a century ago.
In an article titled “A Canadian with $1,000 a Year Can Live Very Comfortably and Enjoyably in Paris,” Hemingway discusses the amount of money required to live well in the City of Light.
“My wife and I have an excellent meal there,” the young journalist says of a restaurant on the corner of the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue Jacob, “equal in cooking and quality of food to the best restaurants in America, for fifty cents apiece … It sounds unbelievable but it is simply a case of prices not having advanced in proportion to the increased value of the dollar.”
1,000 Canadian dollars in 1922 equates to 17,000 Canadian dollars, or 13,000 U.S. dollars, today. Even with the dollar at parity with the euro, it would be difficult to live on such a sum in Paris today. But it is possible to live well as an artist in the French capital in 2022.
In the five years I have lived here, I have found the time to write three novels and still live better than I did in London, where I worked full-time. I worked, on average, 15 hours per week in the last financial year. Yet I dined in restaurants once a week, drank in cafes frequently, took a three-week holiday to Italy and a three-week holiday to Australia, and had 8,000 euros left over.
Not bad for a humble teacher. After studying law in Australia and living in the United Kingdom for a few years, I became tired of work-obsessed London and decided to try my luck as a writer in Paris. On arrival, a friend told me she took legal English classes throughout her law studies and that I should look for a job teaching these courses at one of the universities.
I decided to aim high and sent my CV to the English coordinator for law studies at the Sorbonne. This led to a brisk meeting and an even brisker offer to teach as many classes as I wanted. Although badly paid, I enjoyed this position and branched out to private institutions, where salaries are higher than in the more prestigious public schools.
Law is a specialized field, but demand for native English-speaking teachers is high in all subject areas. I have friends, none of whom have Ph.D.s, who have been asked to teach courses in areas including graphic design, fashion, history, and literature. Teaching provides a well-balanced routine for creative work. The workweek is short. Holidays are long. The pay is not extravagant, but it is enough to enjoy what Paris has to offer.
I live with my fiancee in the Marais — in my opinion the city’s most attractive quartier. My apartment is 530 square feet, large by Parisian standards, and it has a charming interior with parquet floors. The afternoon sun pours through five large windows with a view of the spire of the Saint-Paul cathedral, whose shadow reaches the banks of the Seine, along which I run to clear my head several times a week.
The area was favored by the aristocracy in the 17th century. Today, it is a hub for the Orthodox Jewish and gay communities and boasts an inordinate number of restaurants, bars, and museums in the former hotels particuliers. In strolling distance from my apartment is a cafe where I play chess, a bar where I play pool, and a brasserie I frequent because of its cheap wine (3.40 per glass) and steak tartare for 12 euros. Prices include taxes, bread, and tap water, and tipping is optional.
For our apartment, my fiancee and I pay 1,500 euros per month. Bills add another 75 per month each, a total of around 10,000 annually for my lodging. A monthly transport pass is 75 euros per month, or 900 euros per year. I spend around 70 euros on groceries per week. In total, my basic expenditure is roughly 14,500 euros per year. My earnings are around 35,000, leaving a healthy surplus for other expenses, entertainment, and holidays.
This is not cheap in absolute terms. But in Paris, I have the sense I get a lot for what I pay, whereas in London, I felt I was merely surviving. The city is small and well-connected. Space is limited, but the upside is that people are always eager to go out. I have found it easier to meet people with similar interests — including writers, who were previously mythical creatures to me — in Paris than at any other point in my life. The Gertrude Stein salons of Hemingway’s era are gone. But the spirit of the Belle Epoque and interwar period survives.
While a social life and work are easy enough to come by for native English speakers, getting set up here is not without challenges. The French reputation for vexatious administration is well-deserved. Obtaining any kind of official document is like trying to escape a nightmare. Every turn you take leads to another dead end. The language is no picnic either. French people insist you speak French but will resort to rudimentary English the second they hear you desecrating their sacred language.
These difficulties are real. But the rewards are rich for those who stick it out. Once your papers are in order and your language skills of a reasonable standard, an enviable lifestyle is attainable.
I will never forget the mixture of pity and incredulity on my boss’s face in London when I told him I wanted to work part-time to have more time to write. Whatever her faults — and they are manifold — this would never happen in France. Streets and metro stations are named after writers. Artists enjoy pride of place among the great statesmen in the Pantheon. “La littérature, c’est la France,” it is sometimes said.
France’s respect for art and hostility to the money-making “Anglo-Saxon” mentality is both a weakness and a strength. For my part, I have earned relatively little and lived very well for most of the time I have lived here. Working full-time and ascending the corporate ladder is a rational choice for many. But for those who need time for creative work — to live as the young Hemingway did — the French capital remains one of the world’s great cities.
RJ Smith is an Australian teacher and author of fiction living in Paris.
