Most characters from tales set in Paris do not live in anything resembling a luxury Paris apartment. From the pre-Revolution squalor of the Defarge’s St. Antoine wine shop in A Tale of Two Cities to the labyrinthine dankness of the Phantom of the Opera, fiction’s most memorable Parisians have lived in, well, sub-optimal conditions.

Just for fun, though, why not take a little literary stroll and stop in on a few characters, fictional and otherwise, who did get to enjoy a luxury Paris apartment? If you are a bookish sort, it might just give you a few ideas for procuring your own literary luxury Paris apartment.

1. Lady Brett Ashley -- The tragic alcoholic muse from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The wealthy Lady Brett, object of Jake Barnes’ affections, lived in a nameless, generic Deluxe Paris Pad. The real person upon whom Lady Brett’s character was based, however, was Duff Twysden. She lived in a studio apartment hotel on rue Delambre in the Montparnasse neighborhood. In fact, when she couldn’t pay her final hotel bill, take one guess where she went looking for the needed cash. Her friend Hemingway, whose digs, by the way, were a bit more impoverished.

2. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas -- The famous salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Montparnasse adorns modern literary history as way more than a luxury Paris apartment. It was where the ultimate arts community networker did her entertaining, introducing, and connecting among the post-World-War-I “Lost Generation.” As comfortable as Stein’s Rue de Fleurus salon was, one might argue that the notable luxury was its intellectual excitement. The salon of Stein and Toklas was where expatriate artists and writers met--and where ideas fermented and became part of the heady 1920s wine of modernism.

3. Marie Duplessis—the Original Camille. On 17 Bd. De la Madeleine (9th Arrondissement) is the luxury Paris apartment building made famous by Alexandre Dumas in his novel the La Dame aux Camellias. Most of us know the story of Marie Duplessis by way of the classic 1936 film Camille, in which Greta Garbo played the doomed tubercular Paris courtesan who fell in love with a French nobleman.

If it’s not enough for you just to seek out a luxury Paris apartment—if you must have the literary and historical roots to make your Paris trip a priceless experience—then consider tracking down your own deluxe digs near one (or more) of Paris’s literary legends.

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