Whenever business brought me to Paris, my wife, Margaret, happily tagged along. Evenings and weekends we explored the signature attractions, from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower, and devoured the best Paris offered in art, film and fashion. But on our latest visit, we pursued Margaret’s true passion, the written word, by following in the footsteps of famous writers who made the City of Light the literary capital of the world. Our sojourns took us from the city’s eyes and mouth — its bookstores and cafés — through its heart of cathedrals and cemeteries and into the very belly of Paris, its sewers.

We began our literary peregrinations with a writer synonymous with Paris, Victor Hugo, a colossus of world literature. Hugo’s enduring reputation is due in no small measure to the success on the modern stage of Les Misérables, an adaptation of his 1862 novel, which Margaret and I applauded at performances in London and New York. The author died in Paris in 1885, and we paid homage at his tomb in the exclusive Panthéon, an 18th-century Gothic masterpiece with a view. The Panthéon serves as France’s mausoleum to its greatest figures, and we also gave our nod to other notable French authors enshrined here, including Voltaire and Rousseau and a favorite from my youth, Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers.

Victor Hugo fans can visit his residence-museum at 6 Place des Vosges, one of the six symmetrical houses in a fashionable quadrangle Henry IV built in the 17th century and dubbed Place Royal. But the chief monument to Hugo’s work is Notre-Dame Cathedral, the setting for The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, published in Paris in 1862 as Notre-Dame de Paris. In fact, the vast popularity of Hugo’s novel prompted Paris to restore the then-neglected cathedral, which today marks the heart of Paris and all of France. We hiked the 387 stairs to the tip of the bell tower before, and we did so again with renewed purpose, pleased by the close-up views of the famous gargoyles that figure in the sad tale of Quasimodo.

Our final lap in pursuit of Victor Hugo brought us down from the steeple and into the sewers, the setting for a famous sequence in Les Misérables where the indefatigable Inspector Javert confronts the fleeing convict Jean Valjean. The sewers are the longest on Earth (about 1,300 miles of pipes) and handle more daily waste than any other municipal system. In Victor Hugo’s day, the sewers had just been modernized, and it’s the 19th-century version that dominates the displays in the Paris Sewer Museum. The self-guided sewer tour covers a series of underground galleries strewn with the cleaning machines, gas masks, yellow hip waders, hard hats, headlamps and flusher trolleys from a century or more past.

A slightly unsavory stench accompanied us throughout our quarter-mile stroll and, combined with the thudding sound of nearby rushing waste waters, caused us to wholly agree with Hugo’s summation: “Nothing equaled the horror of this old voiding crypt.”

Up from the sewers, we longed to sample some more romantic settings from literary Paris. Strolling the Left Bank of the Seine, we made our way forward into the literary headwaters of early-20th-century Paris. Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other pioneering writers started gravitating to the Left Bank when American expatriate Sylvia Beach opened the Sylvia Beach Bookstore in 1919. Beach later defied the censors and published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Her bookstore did not survive World War II, but it enjoyed a reincarnation in 1951 when another American, George Whitman, opened the Shakespeare and Company bookstore nearby.

Whitman shared tea and pancakes with a new, less lost but equally rebellious generation of authors that included one of our favorite literary couples, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, as well as Lawrence Durrell; Richard Wright; and the Beat Generation’s Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. On our first visit to Paris, Whitman welcomed us warmly, ushered us upstairs for a chat and offered us a bed in which to crash (an offer we declined). With George Whitman’s death at 98 last year, his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, took over this maze of disheveled shelves and galleries, the quintessential Paris bookshop.

George Whitman is buried in Paris at the world’s most-visited graveyard, as are a number of writers who transformed the city into a page-turner, so we could hardly fail to pay our respects. Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris’ largest, is a spacious garden of mysteries and treasures. Stray cats cavort on the monuments and freelance tour guides lie in wait. We began on one end at the large shrine containing the doomed medieval lovers Héloise and Abelard and proceeded through the centuries, past markers to Apollinaire and Molière and on to those of Balzac, Colette and Proust. Three expatriates commanded our special attention. The ashes of black American novelist Richard Wright are in the cemetery’s columbarium, and the remains of Gertrude Stein are interred in a substantial sepulcher, while Ireland’s Oscar Wilde is entombed in a sizable monument strewn with rose petals on the morning of our visit.

Another final line for writers is Montparnasse Cemetery on the Left Bank. Here we found markers for French poet Charles Baudelaire, absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, the side-by-side graves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and, unexpectedly, the grave of Carlos Fuentes.

We might well have sought out scores of other locations where writers left an inspired mark in Paris, but café hopping on the Left Bank swallowed up our remaining free time. The boulevards of Saint-Germain and Montparnasse make for an endless literary buffet. Our first toast to life and literature was at Café les Deux Magots, where Oscar Wilde drank absinthe on the terrace, Simone de Beauvoir fought writer’s block and Gore Vidal met Christopher Isherwood. Our next sip of coffee came at Café de Flore, a study of sorts for existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote daily here from 9 a.m. to noon.

We stopped for lunch at La Closerie des Lilas. Here Hemingway revised The Sun Also Rises, James Joyce celebrated the publication of Ulysses, and Thomas Wolfe used it as a setting in Of Time and the River. Lilas is a particularly sweet café these days for the literary traveler, its tables labeled with brass markers identifying Baudelaire, Verlaine and other patrons who gathered here.

In the afternoon, we refreshed ourselves at La Coupole, once a bohemian “sidewalk academy” for the likes of Hemingway and Kay Boyle, and later for Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Rebuilt in the 1980s, La Coupole today is more swanky than nostalgic. We found the Café du Dôme more atmospheric, a Left Bank dive much favored in the 1920s. The Dome appears in several scenes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Equally evocative is the Café de la Mairie, where Hemingway drank, Beckett breakfasted, Saul Bellow dined and Sartre and Camus finally parted ways.

Montparnasse Cemetery | Photo: © Wam1975 | Dreamstime.com

Our own favorite proved to be Le Select, a little-changed 1925 café with ample sidewalk seating. I championed the croquet-monsieur while Margaret preferred the onion soup and Welsh rarebit. Le Select has long been a special favorite of couples, it seems. Henry Miller and Anais Nin frequented Le Select, Paris’ first 24-hour café, while Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir liked it, too. In more recent decades, Le Select hosted James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury and critic Susan Sontag, whose final resting place, Montparnasse Cemetery, is nearby.

As a literary time machine, Paris certainly has no rival, and we savored each page. As Hemingway wrote in his memoir, “Paris is a moveable feast,” and our Left Bank rambles only made us hungry to devour more.

INFO TO GO

Charles de Gaulle International Airport (CDG) consists of three terminals connected by the CDGVAL shuttle train. The RER commuter train Line B, leaving from Terminal 3, is the fastest way into the city (35–45 minutes, about $13). An airport taxi costs about $90. In the city, the 16-line Metro, handling 6.75 million passengers daily, costs $2 and up, but a carnet of 10 tickets (about $16) lowers the per-ride cost. Taxis around town carry about a $7 minimum charge. Most of Paris can be explored on foot from subway stops.

LODGING

L’HOTEL

Oscar Wilde’s last home is still the most glamorous spot on the Left Bank, with spiral staircases, a Michelin-starred restaurant and a library bar. 13 Rue des Beaux-Arts, 6e $$$$

LE PAVILLION DES LETTRES

With 26 guestrooms and suites keyed to authors from Hans Christian Andersen to Emile Zola, this refined boutique hotel offers a breakfast salon and library. 12 Rue des Saussaies, 8e $$$

RITZ PARIS

Proust had private rooms here, and the Fitzgeralds lit up the place; although the Hemingway Bar closed, book lovers can still put on the Ritz. 15 Place Vendrome, 1er $$$$

DINING

CAFÉ LES DEUX MAGOTS

This 19th-century hangout for Verlaine and Rimbaud (and later Oscar Wilde, Hart Crane, Simone de Beauvoir and Gore Vidal) still attracts famished writers and readers. 6 Place Saint-Germain des Prés, 6e $$–$$$

CAFÉ DU DÔME

The Dome dominated the Roaring Twenties, with patrons from Sinclair Lewis to Samuel Beckett. It is now a Michelin-starred eatery, famed for seafood. 108 Blvd. du Montparnasse, 14e $$$$

LA COUPOLE

This brasserie, where James Joyce sipped whiskey, the Fitzgeralds guzzled Champagne and Camus celebrated his Nobel Prize, is an Art Deco jewel. 102 Blvd. du Montparnasse, 14e $$$–$$$$