Rue Mouffetard, the Contrescarpe and the quarter's real market

Walks · 22 October 2026

It runs down from the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève towards the old city gate, and has done for two thousand years. It is the most photographed street in the 5th and one of the most misread: its charm is not at the top, where everyone stops.

A Roman road

The Mouffetard follows the Roman road linking Lutetia to southern Gaul, towards Lyon and Italy. It then crossed a suburb outside the walls, the bourg Saint-Médard, which stayed rural and poor for a long time.

Its name is often traced to the Bièvre, a now-buried river that ran below and stank: tanners, dyers and butchers emptied into it. Mouffette meant a foul smell. A duller and probably sounder derivation is from mont Cétard.

It was never cut through or widened by Haussmann, which is exactly why it has kept its two-metre pavements, its crooked buildings and its old shop signs.

The market, and how not to get it wrong

The top of the street, between place de la Contrescarpe and rue de l'Épée-de-Bois, has become a run of set-menu restaurants and crêperies. Do not eat there.

The real market starts lower down, from rue de l'Arbalète, and runs Tuesday to Sunday morning. It is not made of stalls but of shops open onto the street: fishmongers, cheesemongers, greengrocers, a butcher, a tripe seller. The crowd is a neighbourhood doing its shopping, not an attraction.

Walk down to Saint-Médard, the church that closes the view at the bottom. Its graveyard was the scene in the eighteenth century of the Jansenist convulsions, a collective hysteria so spectacular that Louis XV had the place shut, which earned the gate a famous piece of graffiti: by order of the king, God is forbidden to perform miracles here.

On Sunday mornings a band sometimes plays in front of Saint-Médard and people dance on the pavement. It is not laid on for visitors; it is a local habit.

Place de la Contrescarpe

At the top of the street, a small round square planted with trees, with a fountain and four terraces. The name comes from the counterscarp of Philippe Auguste's city wall, which ran just alongside.

It is a good place for a late-afternoon coffee, as long as you know you are paying for the square. Cafés there cost more than thirty metres away.

At number 1, a plaque recalls the Pomme de Pin tavern, mentioned by Rabelais and frequented by the poets of the Pléiade.

Hemingway, at 74 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine

Two steps from the Contrescarpe, at 74 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, a plaque records that the writer lived there from 1922 to 1923, on the third floor, with his first wife Hadley. The flat had no hot water and no lavatory; he worked in a rented room at the top of a hotel on rue Descartes.

In A Moveable Feast, written forty years later, he describes the quarter with a surveyor's precision: the cafés on the square, the goatherd coming up the street playing his pipes, the cold, the hunger, and the Luxembourg crossed to avoid restaurants whose smell was unbearable to a man who had not eaten.

At 39 rue Descartes another plaque marks the hotel where Verlaine died in 1896 and where Hemingway rented his writing room. Thirty years separate them; the street brought them together.

Extending the walk

From the bottom of the Mouffetard, three directions are worth it.

• The Jardin des Plantes, seven minutes east. A botanical garden created in 1635, a menagerie, the great glasshouses, and the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution with its procession of animals.
• The Grande Mosquée de Paris, next door, built in the 1920s. A patio, zellige tilework, and a tea room where you drink mint tea under the plane trees.
• The Arènes de Lutèce, north, by rue Monge.

All of it fits in a square five hundred metres on a side, and makes probably the densest half-day of walking in Paris.

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