Moving our feast of fisticuffs right along from Part 1, the third and hopefully final source of confusion on the Hemingway-in-Paris tour has to do with Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop so famous that you’d think everybody would know by now that the current version of it, on Rue de la Buchérie within spitting distance of Nôtre-Dame, is not where Hembody hung out. But no, that one is where Allen Ginsberg hung out.

Big difference. Hemingway would have eaten Ginsberg for lunch on a croissant.

Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare and Company was at 12 Rue de l’Odéon, and its stock of English-language classics was a magnet for Joyce, Pound, Scott Fitzgerald, Eliot and, alright Ernest, come on in but don’t break anything. Funnily enough, he did break something here: a flower vase, upon reading a terrible review of a short story he’d written.

Beach (1887-1962) had started out attending readings by the likes of André Gide and Paul Valéry at Maison des Amis des Livres, Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop right across the street.

She opened an English-language version that moved here in 1921. It famously published Joyce’s “Ulysses” the following year but, partly because of that, always struggled financially. Beach finally closed up shop in 1941, while she was interned by the Nazis, the books cached away upstairs, but in ‘44, Hemingway – riding with his own armed posse as a correspondent for Collier’s magazine – “liberated” the store in 1944 (along with the Brasserie Lipp, the Cafe de la Paix and the Ritz Hotel).

This is our hero toasting his defeat of the Nazis with Janet Flanner at Les Deux Magots, another pub we’ll be revisiting later. Flanner was a fellow war correspondent, and she certainly looks every bit as tough as he does, doesn’t she? Notice the blood. The colour of the cognac, I mean.

George Whitman has been running a different Shakespeare and Company bookshop on Rue de la Buchérie since 1951. Hundreds of authors have bunked at his place, possibly too drunk to move, including Henry Miller, Anäis Nin and Ginsberg.

But let’s get back to 1922 and, inexplicably, the present tense.

As the year rolls to a close, Hemingway is filing the odd newspaper report back to Canada, most notably on his meeting with rising Italian star Benito Mussolini. On this trip he takes Hadley around Italy showing her where he did time in the ambulance service during World War I and where he was wounded, etc, etc.

Truly boring stuff, really, but soon after they get back to Paris he’s packing his bags again, this time to cover the war between Greece and Turkey. Hadley is furious at being abandoned (she’ll just have to get used to it) but when he comes home in three weeks, first he gets his head shaved because his hair is full of lice, and then gives her peace offerings – necklaces of ivory and amber.

Ernest comes home from covering the Lausanne “No More War” Conference on December 3, and the same day Hadley manages to lose a suitcase at Gare Saint-Lazare that’s full of all his fiction manuscripts to date. Well, it’s a chaotic place, the railway station. On December 4 Ernest takes the night train back to Lausanne. Coincidence?

They get over it, as young people in love do, and in mid-January Hadley discovers she’s pregnant. Wonderful news, but they’re leery about having the baby on, you know, foreign soil. It’s an American baby and it should be born on American soil, so they make all the arrangements for the delivery to take place in – Canada. (It’s almost America, yet it’s almost France!)

On August 26 Ernie, having not only made his first foray into Spain to see the bullfights and the bovine craziness of Pamplona, and having had his first portrait painted, by Henry Strater, and having had his “Three Stories and Ten Poems” just published in Paris, escorts Hadley on board a ship with a foreign name, the Andania, bound for almost America.

On September 10 Ernest trades in his correspondent’s card for a genuine reporter’s button at the Toronto Star. The editor send him off to New York to cover a visit by British Prime Minister Lloyd George and he gets back on October 10 just in time to find out that Hadley’s already had the baby.

On December 23 he goes to Oak Park, Illinois, alone to see his folks. Coincidence?

But he’s back in Toronto for Christmas morning. Aww.

Little Jack would gratefully outgrow his nickname “Bumby” and eventually manage to get on well with the old man despite their years of estrangement due to divorce.

Jack, whose godparents were Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, was decorated in World War II after spending six months in a PoW camp, became an outdoors writer himself and fathered three daughters, including the actresses Margaux and Mariel. He outlived Margaux, dying in 2000.

On New Year’s Day 1924, Hemingway tells the Toronto Star that he thinks he’s been working for them for too long. Newspapers will do that to you. He turns in his official Toronto Star fedora and shaving mug, planning to grow a moustache and write novels using nothing but half a razor and incredibly short sentences.

By January 19 Mr and Mrs Hemingway plus John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway are at sea, on the Antonia this time, which pulls into Cherbourg on the 30th. Their new address, quickly secured, is 113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

It’s comfortably perched atop a sawmill. What a great choice! The block is today part of the Ecole Alsacienne, one of many schools and colleges in the neighbourhood, so it’s a safe bet that the noise hasn’t abated one iota.

Ford Maddox Ford, who invented the two-Ford family, gives our Ernie a job putting together the Transatlantic Review, which will be full of his writing, so that works out nicely. Maybe now Hemingway can explore Paris a little more.

He also finds time to have his portrait painted yet again, this time by Waldo Peirce, who, perhaps sporting a shiner courtesy of Ernest, titles it “Kid Balzac”.

Right around the corner from his lumbering den of din is La Closerie des Lilas, a famously quiet café at 171 Boulevard du Montparnasse. He likes the Closerie because he can get some quiet reading and writing done here, ostensibly at the bar where there’s a brass marker bearing his name. (No, it wasn’t there when he was a customer.)

In fact he sits where the light is best, away from the direct sunshine, in the mornings at a table to the right of the bar, in the late afternoon at a corner table and often, if the weather is nice, at the marble-topped tables outside. This, supposedly, is where he writes “The Sun Also Rises” in six weeks, a record that stands for 40 years until Jack “Aunt Fetamine” Kerouac comes along.

Sometimes, in later years, the Closerie is too quiet for Hemingway and John Dos Passos, who get pissed and read unnecessarily loudly from the Old Testament. Another time, one source says, Scott Fitzgerald comes into the Closerie and asks Ernest to read his manuscript of “The Great Gatsby” instead.

This doesn’t seem likely. Maybe it was a different manuscript. “Gatsby” had already been published when Fitzgerald first met Hemingway in 1925, but we’ll get to that.

Opened in 1847, the “enclosed lilac garden” also serves Stein and Toklas, Henry James, Picasso, Apollinaire, Man Ray and Samuel Beckett, and before them Ingres and Chateaubriand, and after them Lenin and Trotsky.

In 1925, the staff of the Closerie come endearingly to Ernest’s rescue when he and his friend Joan Miró (1893-1983) are both struggling. Ernest carefully arranges to pay for a Miró painting he likes, “The Farm”, in six installments, but comes up skint for the last.

“The day the dough was due,” he tells AE Hotchner in 1950, “I came in here sad-ass for a drink. The barman asked me what was wrong and I told him about the painting. He quietly passed the word around to the waiters and they raised the money for me out of their own pockets.”

The artwork was by then hanging in Hemingway’s house in Cuba, insured for $200,000.

The Dingo Bar, an expatriate favourite at 10 Rue Delambre now completely transformed as the Auberge de Venise, is where the still-unpublished novelists Hemingway and Morley Callaghan meet the already-best-selling F Scott Fitzgerald.

It’s late April 1925, and “The Great Gatsby” has only been out for a few weeks. Scott and Zelda come in and have more than a few drinks with them. Callaghan is the Canadian writer most famous for winning Round 3 in the ring with Ernie, though Ernie will forever dispute the decision. Scott hands Hemingway a copy of his book, which he reads over the next two weeks, fuming over every well-crafted, well-paid sentence. It’s fuel for his creative (and competitive) fire.

Ernie also drinks at the Dingo with English aristocrat Lady Duff Twysden and her lover Pat Guthrie (identified by Ernest as Pat Swazey in Hotchner’s biography), but to their discredit they become Brett Ashley and Mike Campbell in “The Sun Also Rises”. The novel’s unflattering depictions alienate many of his Paris pals.

Ernie also drinks (another motif) at the Brasserie l’Escorailles at 29 Rue des Saintes-Pères, but it’s still called Michaud’s the night Scott Fitzgerald, having had 70 or so too many, laments to Hemingway that Zelda has told him his magic love wand is less than magical and smaller than she requires if she is to become a proper woman. Ernest takes him into the washroom to have a look, as men do, and assures him it’s fine.

No one will ever know of this episode, Hemingway assures Scott, wondering how soon he might reasonably work it into a novel. (He actually waits until alcohol has completely ruined Fitzgerald’s career before he puts the boot in.)

Hemingway is in Austria over New Year 1925 and doesn’t return to Paris until March, but by now he’s sold “In Our Time” and thinks he may yet be a successful writer in his time. It finally comes out in October and he gets started right away on “Torrents of Spring”. He’s just spinning his wheels, really.

Harry’s New York Bar on Rue Daunou also has Ernest as a regular (you have to wonder by now which Paris bar doesn’t). Its website says the place was founded in 1911 and is “the birthplace of the brilliant Bloody Mary”, but the best story belongs to Papa.

In 1950 Ernest tells AE Hotchner that an “ex-pug” used to come in with his pet lion, which was well-behaved except that he sometimes shit on the floor. Every time the owner – yes, his name was Harry – would tell the cat lover to get out and never return, but he kept coming back.

“Realising it was do or die for poor Harry’s business, this time when the lion let go, I went over, picked up the pug, who had been a welterweight, carried him outside and threw him in the street. Then I came back and grabbed the lion’s mane and hustled him out of here. Out on the sidewalk the lion gave me a look, but he went quietly.”

Hemingway reckoned that if he was “getting that aggressive with lions, time had come to put my juice into a book instead”. The result was “A Farewell to Arms”, but that’s jumping the gun on our little saga.

Le Café de Flore at 172 Boulevard Saint-Germain, founded in 1887, still does a brisk business, though tourists don’t quite seem the same compared to the likes of Pascal, Trotsky, Giacometti, Zadkine, Picasso and Tanguy. Hemingway is often found here hunched over a book.

Apollinaire and Salmon had a newspaper headquartered here in 1913 and over the next years the poets Philippe Soupault, André Breton and Aragon gravitated together and concocted the anti-art movement called dadaism.

Right next door at #170 is Les Deux Magots, which gets its name from the two wooden statues of Chinese commercial agents (magots) that adorn a pillar inside. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Pablo Picasso were regulars, and so [loud sigh] was Hemingway.

Staggering distance, really.

Le Dome at 108 Boulevard du Montparnasse was another favoured haunt of creative minds between the world wars, but there will be no prizes for guessing if our Ernie was among them.

At the end of the year he figures he’ll sojourn in Austria again, and this time gets an unexpected Christmas present in the form of Vogue reporter Pauline Pfeiffer. She is a marked woman.

“In Our Time” publisher Horace Liveright telegrams from New York to say “Torrents of Spring” is crap, and Hem prepares to sail over for Round 4. He arrives in the Big Apple on February 9, figuratively breaks Liveright’s nose and their contract on the 10th, pays a visit to Max Perkins at Scribner’s on the 11th, signs a contract with him on the 17th and sails back to France on the 20th.

Soon enough, bless that Maxwell Perkins, “The Sun Also Rises” rises, and it’s a beaut. Hemingway is suddenly rich and famous – and in colossal trouble.

First, Hadley has found out that her husband has been having an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer and they separate. Hadley dictates the terms of divorce and, for the time, they’re murder: Ernest must stay the hell away from Pauline for six months to test how strong his love is for her, and all the royalties from his new novel must go to Hadley. Ernie agrees, and dedicates the book to Bumby.

Hemingway lives up to his end of the bargain, but being without both Hadley and Pauline almost does him in. He writes to Pauline, now in the States, about committing suicide, though his own father beats him to it in 1928 and Ernest doesn’t get around to it himself until 1961, three wives later. (His granddaughter Margaux self-overdoses on pills on the 35th anniversary of Ernest’s suicide in 1996, reopening the book on a possible genetic tendency to nip life in the bud.)

Ernie’s divorce comes through in late January 1927 and he marries Pauline on May 10. On their honeymoon in the fishing port of Graul-du-Roi he cuts open his foot and by the time they get back to Paris it’s infected enough to keep him in bed for 10 days.

Hemingway’s last apartment in Paris is at 6 Rue Férou. This is where he gets himself a nasty gash on the head too (and a permanent scar) in March 1928 when he yanks what he thinks is the toilet chain and brings the skylight down in a crash. He gets stitched up at the American Hospital in Neuilly. The accident, in which he says he’s lost a pint of blood, has prompted much speculation over the years regarding his various claims of war wounds.

The other trouble that “The Sun Also Rises” lands Ernie in is with his Paris chums.

Le Trou dans le Mur on the Boulevard des Capuchines is true to its name. Hemingway favours the hole in the wall now that the novel’s been published because its mirrored walls let him keep an eye out for acquaintances disgruntled by their portrayal. Harold Loeb, who is Robert Cohn in the book, issues a death threat and Ernest tells him this is where he’ll be. The showdown never happens.

Hemingway has long carried around a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot for luck, the first massaged to an ebony glow and the second rubbed fur-less, the claws scratching through his pocket to let him know it’s still working. Or is it? The Paris crowd has turned on him, and he’s milked the environs dry of material. Now he’s looking for a less chilly city to explore.

Pauline is pregnant, and that’s all he’s going to write for Paris. They’re off to Key West, Florida, where there are not just tourists following Hemingway around to this day but a whole lot of old men with big bushy white beards trying their damndest to look like him.

“Paris was a fine place to be quite young in,” Hemingway wrote in a 1934 article for Esquire magazine, “but she is like a mistress who does not grow old and she has other lovers now.”