Graphic designer Yann Legendre created these portraits of writers who lived and wrote in Paris in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Legendre’s illustrations are excerpted from the anthology Paris au pied de la lettre, by Mathilde Helleu.

Ernest Hemingway.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Paul Verlaine.

Charles Baudelaire.

“And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul, / The image came of my majestic swan / With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime, / As of an exile whom one great desire / Gnaws with no truce.” —Charles Baudelaire, “The Swan”

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” —Henry Miller, The Tropic of Cancer