City Of Words

On the steps of the Odeon Theatre, Colm Quilligan sits waiting for erudite tourists at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. from Wednesday to Sunday. The slightly built 43-year-old actor from Rathmines has taken a break from the successful Dublin Literary Pub Crawl he co-founded 10 years ago to try a new venture in Paris.

"I was reading about Joyce, Beckett and Wilde, and how they all left what Joyce called `this island behind an island, this afterthought of Europe' to come here," Quilligan explains. "I was also fascinated by the whole idea of Ireland as part of mainstream European literature - and I have a strong business sense."

Quilligan summons up his prodigious memory and peoples the streets of the Left Bank with the ghosts of fictional characters, publishers and writers long dead. The Paris Literary Promenade is about to begin.

First there is "the midwife", Sylvia Beach, the American who founded the Shakespeare and Company bookshop at number 12, rue de l'Odeon, in 1919. For a moment, Mr Quilligan becomes Beach, telling how she "saw a tall slouching figure" at a party one evening. "He put his limp, boneless hand into my tough little paw," she wrote later. The tall slouching figure was James Joyce, and when Ulysses was banned in New York, Beach decided to publish the masterpiece. The Lyon printer couldn't read English, which accounts for the spelling errors in the first edition.

Ernest Hemingway was one of the bookshop habitues whom Sylvia Beach hit up for a contribution to help publish Ulysses. It was, he said, "a Goddam most wonderful book". The two men liked drinking together. Hemingway carried Joyce home slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, prompting the Irishman to call him "this great, powerful peasant as strong as a buffalo." Nora Barnacle was not so keen on the drinking binges.

"If you come home drunk one more time," she threatened, "I'll baptise the children."

As we walk towards the Luxembourg Gardens, Quilligan recounts the Paris lives of two black American writers, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, both of whom arrived after the second World War, fleeing racism and bigotry against homosexuals. Quilligan is part impersonator, part lecturer, part tour guide.

His performance swings from Marie de Medici's purchase of the gardens in 1615 to its confiscation by the Luftwaffe during the Nazi occupation and back to the 1930s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald walked this way to the home of Gertrude Stein at 27, rue de Fleurus.

Gertrude Stein was "the mother of modernism", but was a lesbian and did not like being referred to as a woman. She claimed she gave "fatherly" advice to young writers. "We were like brothers,["] Hemingway said of her - until she pronounced Fitzgerald the better writer. (From then on, Hemingway called her "the old bitch"). Stein thought herself a great writer, but she is better remembered as an art collector and the soul of Paris's most lively literary salon. Picasso painted her, in a biographer's words, "with the head of a Roman emperor and an Irish washer woman's body". Stein snapped, "That doesn't look like me!" on seeing the portrait. "Don't worry," Picasso answered.

"It will."

Victor Hugo abhorred the Eiffel Tower, Mr Quilligan remarks in front of the Pantheon, pointing out that the mausoleum for great Frenchmen, where Hugo is buried, commands a spectacular view across Paris - of the Eiffel Tower. Oscar Wilde met Hugo in 1883, and when he returned to Paris later, Wilde paid his respects to Hugo's remains in the Pantheon. After his two-year imprisonment and a spell in Italy, the disgraced Wilde haunted the cafes of St Germain-des-Pres. The handsome dandy had become a swollen, hulking figure who consumed a bottle of cognac each day. For 2,500 francs (£298), you can spend a night in the room where he died at L'Hotel, in the rue des Beaux Arts.

With Gertrude's Stein's death in 1947, the literary salon ended. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus ushered in existentialism and the literary cafe. We pause near the Ecole Normale Superieure , where Sartre and de Beauvoir met as students, and where Samuel Beckett taught. The cafe on the Place de l'Estrapade is bustling, and Quilligan cites de Beauvoir's memoirs of post-war Paris: "It was the first spring of peace. Paris was as intimate as a village. I felt myself linked to all the unknown people who had shared my past and were as moved as I was by our deliverance."

Beckett "came home to Paris" and abandoned English for French in 1938. When he was stabbed in the chest by a mugger one night, his Donegal tweed coat saved his life. He would have other close calls during the war, when two thirds of the 100 men in his resistance cell were wiped out. On one occasion, the Gestapo searched the Irishman's flat, but went away happy on finding a copy of Mein Kampf.

At 74, rue du Cardinal Lemoine, the third floor flat where Hemingway lived with his first wife Hadley in the early 1920s is for sale. More than 20 years later, in August 1944, Hemingway would attach himself to an American army unit during the liberation of Paris. Proclaiming himself a general, he burst into Sylvia Beach's, kissed her and checked the roof for snipers before moving on to "liberate" the Ritz bar, where Sartre and de Beauvoir joined the party.

Today, Hemingway's description of Paris still feels true. "The best city for a writer to write in," Quilligan quotes him. "It was like having a great treasure given to you."

For more information on the Paris Literary Promenade, telephone Dublin 45-0228 or Paris (01) 45-66-99-81 or (06) 03-27-73- 52.