The first café in Paris had been opened in 1672, and by the 1720s there were around 400 cafés in the city. They became meeting places for the city's writers and scholars. The Café Procope was frequented by Voltaire, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Diderot and d’Alembert.[73] They became important centres for exchanging news, rumors and ideas, often more reliable than the newspapers of the day.[74]