Residence · 1887-1897
Stanislas de Guaita's apartment
Address · 20, avenue Trudaine, 75009 Paris
Metro · Anvers (2) / Pigalle (2, 12)
Today · Private, seen from the street. Residential building, seen from the street.
The story
Avenue Trudaine, a broad tree-lined street in southern Montmartre, is lined with 19th-century bourgeois apartment buildings. In January 1887 Stanislas de Guaita rented a ground-floor apartment at number 20. From then on he spent most of the year there, except for summers at the family château of Alteville in Lorraine, and assembled a remarkable library of works on Kabbalah, alchemy and magic. The apartment looks onto the avenue, a few steps from the Collège Rollin and the Auberge du Clou.
According to Churton, Guaita held Thursday evening gatherings there where people crowded “like alchemists around the athanor”: Papus, Péladan, Abbé Roca, Lady Caithness, Michelet, Barrès, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre. This was the heart of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix, founded in 1888. It was also from here, according to his opponents, that the so-called magical war against Abbé Boullan was launched, which Huysmans and Jules Bois denounced in 1893. These sessions mixed learned conversation, readings and plans for initiatic orders.
Guaita, increasingly reclusive and dependent on drugs, died at 36. The apartment's reputation as a haunted place, reported by Churton, belongs to legend. The building is now private and can be seen from the avenue; Churton publishes a recent photograph of it. His books on Satanism and black magic, collected under the title Le Serpent de la Genèse, remained unfinished. His library, dispersed after his death, fed the market for esoteric books for decades. No plaque recalls his time here.
To be checked · Churton dates Guaita's death to 1898; he died on 19 December 1897 at the Château d'Alteville. Coordinates estimated from the street number.