Lodging · 1901–1902
The Mathers in Montmartre
Address · 28, rue Saint-Vincent, 75018 Paris
Metro · Lamarck-Caulaincourt (12)
Today · Private, seen from the street
The story
Rue Saint-Vincent winds along the northern slope of the Butte Montmartre, behind the Sacré-Cœur. At the turn of the century it was still an almost rural corner: at the junction with rue des Saules, the Lapin Agile cabaret, named after its sign painted by André Gill, drew painters and poets, while a high wall hid the small Saint-Vincent cemetery, where Utrillo, Marcel Aymé and Marcel Carné would later be buried. The Clos Montmartre vineyard, on the other hand, came later: it was replanted in the 1930s by the Société du Vieux Montmartre to save the land from property development.
The Mathers settled in Montmartre towards the end of 1900. In December of that year the journalist André Gaucher published an article titled “Isis à Montmartre” in L'Écho du Merveilleux: he described an Isiac ceremony to which he had been invited in the couple's new home, where the crates had not yet been unpacked but which offered a larger temple and a garden. On 12 January 1901, MacGregor Mathers dated from 28 rue Saint-Vincent a furious letter to W. B. Yeats, whom he accused of siding with the London “rebels”; in it he also denounced the Horoses, a pair of adventurers who had borrowed rituals and books from him without returning them.
Crowley, who had left at the end of 1900 for Mexico and then Asia, returned via Egypt in the autumn of 1902. On 25 October he wrote from Cairo to Gerald Kelly that he would reach Paris via Marseille and suggested a reunion dinner to which the Mathers might be invited. According to Tobias Churton (Aleister Crowley in Paris), relations then soured: Mathers was reserved and some of Crowley's luggage could not be found. The more detailed account of a visit to rue Saint-Vincent in November 1902, with books returned but a trunk withheld, has yet to be checked against Churton's book.
Today rue Saint-Vincent remains one of the quietest streets on the Butte, lined with gardens, the vineyard and the cemetery, with the Lapin Agile still in business. The sources do not describe the building at No. 28.
To be checked · Chronology to be cross-checked with Churton.