Salon · 1880-1898
Stéphane Mallarmé's apartment – the “Tuesdays”
Address · 89, rue de Rome, 75008 Paris
Metro · Rome (2) / Europe (3)
Today · Private, seen from the street. Residential building, seen from the street.
The story
Stéphane Mallarmé, an English teacher at a lycée, moved in 1875 into a modest apartment on rue de Rome, near the Gare Saint-Lazare. From the early 1880s he received an ever wider circle of writers and artists there every Tuesday. These gatherings, known as the “Tuesdays”, became one of the centers of the Symbolist movement. The small, plain apartment was nothing like a fashionable salon. The poet would speak standing by the stove, before an attentive audience.
Churton mentions these evenings in connection with Gauguin and Charles Morice, who attended them around 1891, and among the habits of the Nabis and the Symbolist critics. Mallarmé was close to several regulars of the Art indépendant; Edmond Bailly in fact published a musical setting of his poem “Apparition”. Without being an occultist, the poet shared the idea of a language charged with mystery, which fascinated esoteric circles. He was also in contact with Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and several authors published by Bailly.
Mallarmé died in 1898 at Valvins. The building on rue de Rome is now a private residence, to be viewed from the pavement. The address, a little apart from the other places on the route, usefully completes the map of Symbolist Paris, where poetry, painting and esotericism met. It is worth remembering that for nearly twenty years the Tuesdays brought together successive generations of writers, from André Gide to Paul Valéry. A brief visit is enough.
To be checked · The book mentions the Tuesdays without giving the address, which is known from other sources. Coordinates estimated.