The Catholic girls' school Simone de Beauvoir attended from the age of six until her baccalauréat. The address is now occupied by the Librairie des Femmes — the feminist bookshop and publishing house — which makes it the most improbable coincidence on any Paris literary walk.
Simone de Beauvoir was sent to a private Catholic school for girls at 35 rue Jacob at the age of six, and stayed until she took her baccalauréat. It was the kind of establishment that existed to produce devout, marriageable daughters of the bourgeoisie, and it was where she was educated for a dozen years.
She did not remain devout. Beauvoir lost her faith in adolescence, went to the Sorbonne, placed second in the agrégation in philosophy in 1929, and in 1949 published The Second Sex — the book that argues that womanhood is not a nature but a construction, made by exactly the sort of upbringing this school existed to deliver.
And then the address did something no one arranged. The building is now the Librairie des Femmes, the bookshop and publishing house founded out of the French women's liberation movement in the 1970s.
So the site where Beauvoir was trained to be a Catholic wife now sells feminist publishing on the ground floor. Nobody planned it; the school closed, the premises came up, the publisher took them. It is the one stop on a Beauvoir walk that produces an actual reaction when you are standing on it.
Unlike almost every other address on her map, you can go inside this one.
Beauvoir, aged six, begins at the Catholic girls' school on the rue Jacob.
She stays until her baccalauréat, and loses her faith in adolescence.
She places second in the agrégation in philosophy.
The Second Sex is published.
The address becomes the Librairie des Femmes, the feminist bookshop and publishing house.
At a private Catholic school for girls at 35 rue Jacob in the 6th arrondissement, from the age of six until she took her baccalauréat. It was an institution designed to turn out devout, marriageable daughters of the bourgeoisie.
The Librairie des Femmes — the feminist bookshop and publishing house that came out of the French women's liberation movement. The school where Beauvoir was educated to be a Catholic wife is now a feminist publisher, and nobody arranged it.
Yes, and it is one of the few Beauvoir addresses you can actually enter — the others are private buildings. It sits a short walk from the Place Sartre-Beauvoir and the cafés she worked in.
Studied here
Beauvoir attended the private Catholic girls' school at this address from the age of six until her baccalauréat — an institution meant to produce devout, marriageable daughters. The premises are now the Librairie des Femmes, the feminist bookshop and publisher.
The street that stitches the Left Bank together — river to Beaux-Arts to Saint-Germain to Saint-Sulpice — and the nightly walk Henry Miller could not stop remembering.
Visit the place
Colette's first marital home in Paris, a third-floor apartment she took with her husband Willy in 1893.
Visit the place
The smart restaurant of the quarter — where the hungry Hemingways watched the Joyce family dine, and where F. Scott Fitzgerald asked the question answered in 'A Matter of Measurements.'
Visit the place
The Left Bank quarter around the abbey church, where the cafés doubled as offices and the bars above and below them ran the other half of post-war Paris.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
