Apartment · Montparnasse — facing the cemetery · 14e arrondissement

11 bis rue Victor-Schœlcher

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowSomeone else

A private building overlooking Montparnasse cemetery, where Beauvoir is buried. Exterior only.

The first apartment Simone de Beauvoir could buy with her own money, after the Goncourt Prize of 1954. It became the gathering place for the Les Temps modernes circle, and it looks directly onto the Montparnasse cemetery where she is buried.

Address: 11 bis rue Victor-Schœlcher, 75014 Paris
Years: Simone de Beauvoir's flat from 1955 until her death in 1986

The place, briefly

Simone de Beauvoir won the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for The Mandarins, and with the money she bought this flat — the first she could buy outright with what she had earned herself. She was forty-six, and she stayed until she died in 1986.

The city's account calls it what it was: the first apartment Beauvoir could buy with her own money. For a writer who had spent decades arguing that a woman's independence is finally a material question — that freedom without money is a description of freedom rather than the thing itself — the address is not incidental. The Second Sex had been published five years earlier. This is what its argument looks like as a lease.

The flat became a working address as much as a home. The circle around Les Temps modernes, the review she and Jean-Paul Sartre had founded, met here.

Then there is the window. The building faces Montparnasse cemetery, and Beauvoir is buried in it, in the grave she shares with Sartre. She spent the last thirty years of her life overlooking the ground she is in.

Key facts

When: Bought in 1955; she lived here until her death in 1986
How she paid for it: The Prix Goncourt, won in 1954 for The Mandarins
Why that matters: The first flat she could buy with her own money — six years after The Second Sex
What happened here: The Les Temps modernes circle met in the flat
The view: It faces Montparnasse cemetery, where she is buried beside Sartre
Access: Private building, exterior only

Timeline

1949
The Second Sex is published.
1954
Beauvoir wins the Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins.
1955
She buys the flat at 11 bis rue Victor-Schœlcher with her own money.
1955–1986
The apartment becomes a gathering place for the Les Temps modernes circle.
1986
Beauvoir dies, and is buried in the cemetery the flat looks onto.

On the map

Questions before you go

Where did Simone de Beauvoir live?

For the last thirty years of her life, at 11 bis rue Victor-Schœlcher in the 14th arrondissement — the first flat she was able to buy with her own money, bought in 1955 after the Prix Goncourt. She lived there until her death in 1986.

How did she afford it?

With the Prix Goncourt, won in 1954 for The Mandarins. The city's account is specific that this was the first apartment she could buy with money she had earned herself — which matters for a writer who had argued in The Second Sex, five years earlier, that a woman's independence is finally a material question.

Is it true the flat overlooks her grave?

Yes. The building faces Montparnasse cemetery, and Beauvoir is buried there in the grave she shares with Sartre. She spent three decades looking at the ground she is now in.

Writers who knew this place

Simone de Beauvoir

French · French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.

Lived here · 1955–1986

The first flat Beauvoir could buy with her own money, bought after the 1954 Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins. The Les Temps modernes circle met here, and the building faces the cemetery she is buried in.

— Dans les pas de Simone de Beauvoir, rive gauche

Within walking distance

Apartment · Montparnasse (14th)

91 avenue Denfert-Rochereau

The building where Simone de Beauvoir rented a room in her grandmother's flat in July 1929, at twenty-one, to get out from under her parents — and where she studied for the philosophy agrégation she passed that year.

Visit the place

Landmark · Denfert-Rochereau (Montparnasse's southern edge)

The Catacombs of Paris

The Catacombs are a municipal ossuary in a disused limestone quarry twenty metres under the 14th arrondissement, holding the remains of several million Parisians moved out of the city's overflowing graveyards from 1786 onward. The visit is a 1.5 km one-way walk, 131 steps down and 112 up, at a constant 14°C. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 9.45 a.m.–8.30 p.m., last admission 7.30 p.m.; full rate €31.

Visit the place

Cemetery · Montparnasse

Montparnasse Cemetery

The second-largest cemetery inside Paris — nineteen flat, gridded hectares south of the boulevard du Montparnasse, holding the graves of Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Serge Gainsbourg, Man Ray, Guy de Maupassant, Constantin Brancusi and Marguerite Duras.

Visit the place

Street · Plaisance / Montparnasse

Rue du Château

A workers' street behind the Montparnasse yards with two literary lives — the surrealists' communal house at No. 54, and Henry Miller's broke wanderings looking for a friend and a meal.

Visit the place

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.