20 rue Jacob

What she actually rented

The lease, recorded in the Paris archives and reconstructed by Baptiste Essevaz-Roulet and William Pesson in their study of the site, covered four separate things.

• The pavilion: a small two-storey house set in the courtyard, detached on three sides from the building on the street.
• Its glazed veranda, where most of the Friday gatherings were held.
• The garden, a survival of the long walled gardens that once ran from the rue Jacob down towards the Seine.
• The Temple à l'Amitié in the north-west corner of the garden.

Renée Vivien, the poet who had been the great love of Barney's twenties, died a few weeks after the move and never saw the house.

The temple, and the story that is not true

The temple is a garden folly: four Doric columns, six steps, a pediment carrying the words À L'AMITIÉ and the initials DLV, and inside a perfectly circular room lit from an oculus in the dome. It is roughly four metres across.

For most of the twentieth century it was said to have been built by the Maréchal de Saxe for his mistress, the actress Adrienne Lecouvreur. The dates make that impossible: Lecouvreur died in 1730, and the temple first appears on the imperial cadastre of 1821–22. Essevaz-Roulet and Pesson trace it instead to Nicolas Simon Delamarche, who bought the garden in 1804, and read DLV as the marquis de la Vaupallière, Delamarche's patron. A second story, that the building was a masonic lodge, they date to the 1960s and find nothing in the archives to support. Barney herself believed the Lecouvreur legend and furnished the temple's niches with busts of the actress and the marshal; a bust of Lecouvreur also went up on the pavilion's façade. Both busts appear to have been taken away after her death.

She used the temple first as a painting studio and then as a private room, kept apart from the salon. She furnished it with rough old Spanish chairs and a swan-necked bed, had it scrubbed out and a fire lit in its chimney for receptions, and took people into it two at a time.

My second garden has kept its temple to Friendship, windowless, its doors half shut, the refuge of some solitary who is invisible or gone.

Mon deuxième jardin a su garder son temple à l'Amitié, sans fenêtres, aux portes mi-closes, refuge d'un solitaire invisible ou disparu.

The Fridays

The salon ran from five to eight. Thirty to thirty-five people came on an ordinary Friday and as many as two hundred for a set piece. Berthe Cleyrergue, who came to work for Barney in 1927 and stayed in the house until 1977, made the food: triangular sandwiches, and the small harlequin-coloured cakes from Rumpelmayer's. Barney sometimes forgot which day it was, and Cleyrergue had to tell her that the guests were downstairs.

Barney's stated purpose was traffic between languages. She thought American, British and French writers ought to read and translate one another, and she ran the room to make that happen. Paul Valéry gave the first public reading of his poem Le Cimetière marin there. George Antheil gave the first performance of his First String Quartet. Ernest Hemingway came a few times, and wrote afterwards that plenty of well-off American and French women kept salons but Barney was the only one with a small Greek temple in her garden. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy and Colette were all in the room at one time or another; Robert de Montesquiou was there in the earliest years, before his death in 1921.

Colette had lived four doors along, on the third floor of 28 rue Jacob, from 1893 to 1896. She came back to the street as Barney's friend, gave her the first hearing of her stage version of La Vagabonde in the salon, and once, according to the diary of the abbé Mugnier, was seen running nearly naked through the garden. Marcel Proust managed one visit and called the building the temple of Love by mistake.

The Académie des Femmes

In 1927 Barney gave part of the season a name. The Académie des Femmes was not an institution and had no members in any formal sense. It was a run of Fridays, each given over to one woman writer, who read from work in progress or work no publisher had taken. The Académie française had been electing forty immortals since the seventeenth century and had never elected a woman; this was the reply.

Gertrude Stein, Colette, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Rachilde, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and Anna Wickham were among those honoured, and Renée Vivien posthumously. Stein's evening in 1927 included a French translation Barney had made of passages from The Making of Americans.

Lesbian Paris, stated plainly

Barney was a lesbian and never concealed it, in a period and a family that gave her every reason to. Her father bought up and destroyed the remaining stock and printing plates of her first book, Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes, in 1900, because its poems were addressed to women. She published anonymously until he died in 1902 and under her own name for the seventy years after that.

The rue Jacob was where that life had its address. Renée Vivien, Élisabeth de Gramont, Dolly Wilde and the painter Romaine Brooks, whose relationship with Barney lasted more than fifty years, belong to the house as much as any of the writers who read there. Two novels published in 1928 put the salon into print. Djuna Barnes wrote Barney into Ladies Almanack as Dame Evangeline Musset, and the book's other characters are her circle under invented names. Radclyffe Hall, in The Well of Loneliness, made her the salon hostess Valérie Seymour, and used her as the novel's one figure entirely at peace with herself.

The war, and the long afterwards

The salon stopped for the Second World War. Barney spent it in Italy with Romaine Brooks, in a villa outside Florence, and Berthe Cleyrergue kept the house through the Occupation, hiding her employer's jewellery and passing food to Barney's friends in Paris. The Fridays started again in 1949 and ran on into the 1950s, by which time the room had become a piece of literary history that young writers came to look at as much as a place where reputations were made.

How it ended

In 1966 the whole property at number 20 was divided into a copropriété and sold off in lots. The buyer of the pavilion lot wanted it as his own town house. Barney, then ninety, was granted the right to stay until she died, but the new owner went to court and obtained an eviction order, enforceable four years after it was served. The case reached the newspapers in France and the United States; Georges Pompidou intervened personally and got a promise that the order would not be executed.

What followed was quieter and more effective. An architect declared the pavilion in danger of collapse, carpenters drove shoring props through every room, the kitchen was condemned, and building materials were stacked in the garden. A later report by the chief architect of historic monuments found the props unsuited to the building and probably unnecessary.

My salon is a monument of contemporary literature. Nobody has the right to alter it. I swore I would give up my soul in the place where the mind reigned.

Mon salon est un monument de la littérature contemporaine : personne n'a le droit de le modifier. J'ai fait le serment de rendre l'âme là où l'esprit a régné.

She left the house when it became uninhabitable, saying she would come back in the spring. She died at the Hôtel Meurice in February 1972, aged ninety-five, without returning. She is buried at Passy cemetery under a stone that names her as Remy de Gourmont's Amazon, the nickname the writer gave her early in the rue Jacob years and she carried for the rest of her life.

The address today

The Temple à l'Amitié was listed as a historic monument on 16 January 1947, and the surrounding site was registered in 1975. Between 1967 and 1971 its owner removed the oak parquet, blocked the oculus, cut windows into the walls and enlarged the niches. The protest that followed forced a reconstruction, carried out in 1972–74 from photographs taken in 1909; the certificate of conformity was issued in January 1974. What stands there is the temple's shape put back, not the room Barney furnished.

The Mérimée notice records the temple as the property of a private company. It is not open, and it cannot be seen from the rue Jacob or from anywhere else public — only from the windows of neighbouring buildings. What occupies the pavilion now is not on the public record, and no plaque on the street front has been documented. The street is as close as a visitor gets.