The apartment the young Stefan Zweig rented below Pigalle from November 1904 to June 1905 — the Paris year that runs through The World of Yesterday, on the same street where Degas kept his studio.
Stefan Zweig had just finished a doctorate on the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine when he came to Paris and took rooms here in November 1904. He was twenty-three. He stayed until the following June.
It is the Paris year that matters in his writing. Zweig was not a resident of the city in any long sense — Vienna, and later exile, take up most of his life — but this stretch became one of the set-pieces of The World of Yesterday, the memoir he finished just before his death in 1942. What he describes is a young man's Paris: cheap, sociable, and open in a way he believed, wrongly, was permanent.
The lasting result was a friendship. Around this period Zweig met the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, whose work he translated into German and promoted for years afterwards. In 1914 he was back in Paris meeting his publisher Anton Kippenberg along with Rainer Maria Rilke, Romain Rolland and Léon Bazalgette to plan a collected edition of Verhaeren — a gathering of an Austrian, a Bohemian-Austrian, two Frenchmen and a German publisher, arranging the works of a Belgian, weeks before the war that ended that whole arrangement.
The street has a second literary tenant worth knowing about. Edgar Degas kept his principal studio at number 37, a few doors up, for around twenty-five years — though he was forced out in 1912, seven years after Zweig left. In Zweig's time both addresses were on the rue de Laval; the renaming came later.
Zweig takes rooms at 5 rue Victor-Massé in November, after completing his doctorate.
He leaves Paris in June.
Returns to Paris to plan a collected Verhaeren with Kippenberg, Rilke, Rolland and Bazalgette.
At 5 rue Victor-Massé in the 9th arrondissement, below Pigalle, from November 1904 to June 1905. The street was then called the rue de Laval.
About eight months as a resident, in 1904–05. He returned repeatedly but never settled there; the year became a set-piece in his memoir The World of Yesterday.
Lived here · 1904–1905
Zweig rented rooms at 5 rue Victor-Masse, then the rue de Laval, from November 1904 to June 1905, shortly after completing his doctorate on Hippolyte Taine. The stay became one of the set-pieces of his memoir The World of Yesterday.
Theo van Gogh's small flat, where Vincent turned up unannounced from Antwerp in March 1886. It was too cramped to paint in, which is why the brothers moved to the rue Lepic three months later.
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The studio and apartment Edgar Degas settled into in 1877 — the year he was showing the ballet and café pictures that made his name, a few steps from the place Pigalle.
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The tiny paint shop of Julien 'Père' Tanguy, who supplied the Impressionists on credit, hung their canvases in his window when no dealer would, and sat three times for Van Gogh's most affectionate portrait.
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The legendary Montmartre cabaret where poets, singers, painters, cartoonists and musicians made the room itself an artistic creation — crowned by an extraordinary shadow theater.
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The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
