This painting is the much cooler colour version of the painting “La Contrescarpe, pluie d’avril” (same dimensions and same year of production) even if the colour pink, often favoured by the artist, is also used here for the facades of the rue Mouffetard and for the sky.

It’s evening. The rectilinear architecture of the square and its houses crowned with typically Parisian garrets and chimneys, lit by the setting sun, structures an atmosphere of great poetry, where a couple of lovers curl up in the foreground on the right, in a curved mandorla.

Sitting on the terrace of a café in the heart of the Latin Quarter, the two lovers are indifferent to what surrounds them but constitute the Parisian crowd. They look at each other and hold each other’s left hands, the woman holding in her right hand a necklace that can be received from the man.

This painting makes us question their history, if not evoke similar memories.

Constituting the poster for the exhibition “Paris in the work of Germaine Lacaze (1908-1994)” held in 2023 at the town hall of the 5th arrondissement of Paris, Florence Berthout, its mayor, rightly notes in her preface to the exhibition book :

“The amorous duo in the painting “Lovers are alone in the world, Paris, the Contrescarpe”, isolated in their bubble, in osmosis with the lights and shadows of the Contrescarpe in the rain, perfectly illustrates the role of Paris, the medium of the artist’s visions, illustrating here a song by Claude Robin from 1948.”

The title takes up that of a song by Claude Robin and Henri Decoin’s eponymous film from 1948, telling the story of the imbroglio of a love triangle.

The children of his childhood friend Albert Séeberger, Michèle and Jean-Louis Séeberger, posed for the couple depicted in this painting by Germaine Lacaze.