37 rue Victor-Massé

The place, briefly

This was the address that mattered most in Edgar Degas's working life. He occupied it for around a quarter of a century, filling several floors with studio, living rooms and an enormous accumulation of his own unsold work and other people's — he was a serious and slightly compulsive collector, and the building eventually held Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Gauguin and Van Gogh alongside his own wax figures and unfinished canvases.

In Degas's lifetime the street was called the rue de Laval. It was renamed rue Victor-Massé afterwards, which is why period accounts and modern maps disagree, and why the address is easy to lose track of.

The poet Paul Valéry was brought here to be introduced to Degas in 1896, and left one of the closest accounts anyone wrote of what the man was actually like in the room — the difficulty, the talk, the refusal to be agreeable. Valéry was in his twenties and Degas in his sixties, and the acquaintance lasted until Degas died.

In 1912 the building was slated for demolition work and Degas was made to leave. He was seventy-eight and his eyesight had been failing for years. The forced move broke his working life: he took an apartment on the boulevard de Clichy, did almost no new work, and spent his last years walking the streets of the quarter. He died in 1917.