By early afternoon, the sky had turned pale, and Notre Dame was visible in full glory, its beauty no longer hidden by the ugly scaffoldings that I remembered from my last time here, when the church was covered as though there was something embarrassing about its appearance. The trees had discarded their leaves, and their delicate branches curved like the curlicues of an intricate window.

I sat looking at the river, in front of a bookshop where I had spent many pleasant afternoons and evenings on several visits over the years. In his short book—no, a love poem—to Paris of the 1920s, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway had described the river from a spot similar to where I was last week: “With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the great elms on the stone banks, the pine trees and the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river.”

The bookshop behind me made sure I wouldn’t be lonely. Once called Le Mistral, it later became Shakespeare and Company.

Shop window: A picture of George Whitman at the book store. (Miguel Medina/AFP)

The original Shakespeare and Company in Paris was the one that Sylvia Beach set up on Rue de l’Odeon, and over the years, Berkeley, New York, Moscow, and Bogota too had their versions of Shakespeare and Company. Like Gertrude Stein’s apartment at Rue de Fleurus, Beach’s shop in Paris became the place of comfort for American writers of the “lost generation”—Hemingway himself, but also Francis Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Whitman came to Paris in 1951 after leaving military service, and decided to set up his own bookshop. Like Beach’s shop, his too became the honeypot attracting a new generation of writers, including Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso. Magazines like Merlin made their office in the shop; the first editors of The Paris Review had their early meetings here; and Whitman himself encouraged visiting writers to come and stay, or read to the people visiting his bookshop. In 1962, he met Beach and they agreed that Le Mistral could be renamed Shakespeare and Company. He named his daughter Sylvia.

He nurtured thousands of writers. Anaïs Nin, who had stayed at the store, sometimes with Henry Miller, describes it in her chapbook, Paris Revisited: “There, by the Seine, was the sort of book store I had known: a Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows, wrinkled shutters. And there was George Whitman, undernourished, bearded, a saint among his books, not eager to sell, lending books, housing penniless friends upstairs, a haven bookstore… All those who came for books remained to talk, while George tried to write letters, to open his mail, to order books.”

Appropriately, he called the location of the store at Rue de la Bûcherie, “kilometre zero”. This was the centre of the universe, and a short tour of his bookshop would take you around every corner of the world, covering every topic. That disorganized charm continues, with books piled over two floors, the shelves stacked with new, quirky and difficult-to-get-hold-of titles. You can squat in a corner and read. You come to browse, to smell books. You also buy books.

Earlier this month, the day after my visit, the American novelist Lionel Shriver was going to read from her new novel. Two summers ago, my son Ameya had joined a group of new writers reading from their work. Ameya was 17; his short story was about cricket, and the others were European or American. None of that mattered; this was Paris, it was open. Whitman didn’t turn away anyone, for, who knew if the person turned away was an angel in disguise? And Whitman was the guardian angel.

On the windows outside the shop, there is a text in white chalk, which reads like his manifesto, called Paris Wall Newspaper. Dated 1 January 2004, it says: “Some people call me the Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter because my head is so far up in the clouds that I can imagine all of us are angels in paradise. And instead of being a bona fide bookseller I am more like a frustrated novelist. Store has rooms like chapters in a novel and the fact is Tolstoi and Doestoyevski are more real to me than my next door neighbours. And even stranger is the fact that even before I was born Doestoyevski wrote the story of my life in a book called The Idiot. And ever since reading it I have been searching for the heroine, a girl called Nastasia Filipovna. One hundred years ago my bookstore was a wine shop hidden from the Seine by an annex of the Hotel Dieu Hospital which has since been demolished & replaced by a garden and further back in the year 1600 our whole building was a monastery called La Maison du Mustier. In medieval times each monastery had a Frère Lampier whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years. Now it is my daughter’s turn.” (sic).

His daughter Sylvia has been illuminating Paris in her own way now—running the shop, reviving The Paris Magazine which Whitman had started as the poor man’s Paris Review in 1967, and launching a literary festival. The shop is in safe hands; angels in Paris needn’t despair—there is home at the Tumbleweed Hotel.

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com

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