If we consider Ernest Hemingway’s map and territories, Nîmes is part of his geography and his history. For reasons other than Havana, Paris or Madrid. But the author of Old man and the sea went there often, and Midi Libre followed in his footsteps.
Since we only lend to the rich, we give a lot to Ernest Hemingway. Nothing could be more normal when one considers the lives of the author of A Farewell to Arms, each of which is at least epic.
Everywhere, from Paris to Pamplona, from Key West to Havana, from Madrid to Venice, collective memory, urban legends and oral tradition peddle stories and memories of endless nights, Homeric drinking binges, muscular brawls, and long writing sessions, always standing.
A bar, a high school, a literary prize
Nîmes is no exception to the rule. Rare, however, are the testimonies on the feats of arms of Hemingway in this city, even if his trace is easy to follow, and the landmarks to walk in his steps quickly identified.
A bar bears his name there (that of the Imperator hotel, where he lined up the whiskeys, of the Chivas, we’ll come back to this), a literary prize too (a bullfighting short story contest), a high school too. Formerly called Camargue before being renamed Hemingway by the sole will of a Georges Frêche, president of the region, who had decided, like the king, that it had to be renamed, like others.
A hotel in Grau-du-Roi
That says the depth of a footprint. For what we know: Hem attended his first bullfight in Nîmes on April 27, 1924. It was Pierre Dupuy, well of science without funds in bullfighting, and founder of the mythical magazine Toros, who affirmed this this spring at Midi Libre, for a special issue dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the feria.
In the Gard, he will return in 1927, for his honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline. They will stay at the Grand Hôtel du Pommier in Grau-du-Roi (still located on the canal, it is now called Hôtel Bellevue, and we never fail to recall the passage of this prestigious client there). He will write many short stories there, between two trips to Aigues-Mortes in particular (where he will return in 1947, with his last wife, Mary).
Nîmes between the lines of a posthumous novel
At the twilight of his life, in his last novel, unfinished and published posthumously (Hemingway killed himself on July 21, 1961, The Garden of Eden, appeared in 1986), he will relive his honeymoon through that of his couple of heroes. Who is also staying at Grau-du-Roi, after having arrived in Provence via Avignon, having cycled to the Pont du Gard, then, having let themselves be “pushed by the mistral to Nîmes where they had taken a room at the Imperator.”
A hotel mentioned a second time in the story (“We are known at the Imperator” advances the young hero) and which the future Nobel Prize winner often frequented. Especially in the 1950s, when he followed the bullfighter Antonio Ordoñez, whose rivalry he narrated with Luis Miguel Dominguin, in “The Dangerous Summer”.
A bronze bust of the Imperator?
“At one time, he was quasi-resident here” told us, Christophe Chalvidal, general manager of the Imperator. “He brought this very arty movement here, with Cocteau, Picasso, Dali. I imagine the tables, between them, in the Imperator’s gardens…”
He agrees: “The notoriety of the Imperator was created with Hemingway, as with Ava Gardner, who only came there once, to find her lover Dominguin when she was married to Franck Sinatra .”
And to think that if Hemingway seems to be floating everywhere in the hotel, it might be time to materialize this presence: “I wonder about a bronze sculpture, like the very beautiful bust found in a bar in Havana. Bronze marks something, I think. Look at Nîmes, the importance of the statue of Nimeño. Yes, it can be a project. A project and a tribute. He deserves it.”
In Nîmes, no one will contradict him.
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