Residence · c. 1885-1886
Stanislas de Guaita's first apartment (shared with Péladan)
Address · 24, rue Jean-Baptiste-Pigalle (alors rue Pigalle), 75009 Paris
Metro · Saint-Georges (12) / Pigalle (2, 12)
Today · Private, seen from the street. Residential building, seen from the street.
The story
Rue Pigalle, renamed rue Jean-Baptiste-Pigalle, climbs from the Trinité toward place Pigalle, at the foot of Montmartre. In the 1880s it was a neighborhood of painters, models and literary cafés, a short walk from the Nouvelle-Athènes. Stanislas de Guaita (1861-1897), a wealthy poet from Lorraine who had come to study in Paris, left the Latin Quarter to settle here, drawn by the artistic life of the Right Bank. The young man arrived with a solid family fortune, a passion for poetry and a growing interest in Kabbalah and magic.
Churton reports, following Michelet, that Guaita invited Péladan to share his lodgings, but that the future “Sâr”'s difficult temper soon wore out the friendship. The two men, of opposite temperaments, parted ways; yet in 1888 they would together found the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix. It was also from 24, rue Pigalle that Guaita wrote to Oswald Wirth, his future secretary and tarot designer, to invite him to dinner. Wirth went on to become one of Guaita's most loyal collaborators, entrusted with producing symbolic drawings.
Guaita then moved a few hundred meters east, to avenue Trudaine. The building on rue Pigalle is now an ordinary residence, with no plaque. The site illustrates how geographically close these circles were: most of the players in Parisian occultism lived within a few minutes' walk of one another, between Pigalle, Trudaine and the Chaussée-d'Antin. This proximity encouraged the visits, quarrels and reconciliations that fill Churton's book.
To be checked · The street numbering may have changed since the 1880s; coordinates estimated.