Bookshop · 1888-1890s
Chamuel's Librairie du Merveilleux and offices of L'Initiation
Address · 29, rue de Trévise, 75009 Paris
Metro · Cadet (7)
Today · Other use. Commercial premises; Churton publishes a recent photograph.
The story
Rue de Trévise is a quiet street in the 9th arrondissement, about a kilometer east of the Chaussée-d'Antin. Around 1888, Gérard Encausse, known as Papus, encouraged a former classmate from the Collège Rollin, Lucien Mauchel, to open a specialist bookshop there. Mauchel took the pseudonym Chamuel, the name of an archangel in the Kabbalistic tradition, and called his shop the Librairie du Merveilleux. Churton opens his chapter on Papus by imagining Péladan arriving by cab in front of number 29.
For about ten years the shop served as office and meeting room for almost all of Papus's ventures: the journal L'Initiation, the Martinist Order, the Independent Group for Esoteric Studies and its courses. In 1892 Jules Doinel held the first synod of his Gnostic Church there, with the journal's team. Michelet found the place more “charged with occult effluvia” than Bailly's bookshop, but less frequented by artists.
After the death of Lady Caithness in 1895 and internal quarrels, rue de Trévise gradually lost its central role; Chamuel carried on as a publisher. Today the ground floor of number 29 is an ordinary shop, with no plaque or sign recalling this history. Yet it is one of the most important addresses of French occultism in the late 19th century. The street itself has kept its 19th-century buildings and its calm, which helps one imagine the comings and goings of the readers of L'Initiation.