4 Rue de Savoie

When Blaise Cendrars returned to Europe from New York in the summer of 1912, he was almost completely unknown. He had written the long poem that would become Easter in New York, and he had begun using the name Blaise Cendrars instead of Frédéric Sauser, but his career had barely started. By 31 August he was back in Paris, and by 25 September 1912 surviving correspondence already carries the letterhead of Les Hommes nouveaux, 4 rue de Savoie.[1]

The address was not a conventional publishing office. It was Cendrars's own small attic room — his mansarde. From here he helped run Les Hommes nouveaux, the short-lived Franco-German review founded with the anarchist writer Emil Szittya and Marius Hanot. Its stationery listed "Rédaction et administration : 4, Rue de Savoie Paris", turning Cendrars's bedroom into both home and editorial headquarters.[2]

The books published from an attic

That modest room became the address of Cendrars's first books. In 1912 the imprint published Les Pâques, the poem that acquired its familiar title Les Pâques à New York only in 1919. In 1913 came Séquences.[2]

Then came the work that made the address part of the history of modern book design. In 1913 Cendrars collaborated with Sonia Delaunay on La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, combining his poem with her blocks of simultaneous color on a sheet almost two meters long, folded accordion-style. The Bibliothèque nationale de France's record of the book preserves the imprint exactly: Éditions des Hommes nouveaux, 4, rue de Savoie, 1913.[3]

The collaboration was rooted in the immediate neighborhood. Robert and Sonia Delaunay lived around the corner at 3 rue des Grands-Augustins. Sonia Delaunay remembered the Cendrars of January 1913 as a frail, pale young man; both of them spoke Russian, and a friendship formed at once. He became close to Guillaume Apollinaire and associated with artists including the Delaunays, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger and Amedeo Modigliani.[4]

An attic full of modern art

I saw Marc Chagall's first paintings in the little attic where Blaise Cendrars lived, at 4 rue de Savoie, because the walls of Blaise Cendrars's dwelling were studded with paintings by Modigliani, Robert Delaunay, and Marc Chagall.

The room was poor, but not bare. The critic Florent Fels's recollection preserves a picture of the attic no photograph does: a broke poet's bedroom functioning simultaneously as editorial office, publishing address and informal avant-garde gallery.[5]

The war, and the return

Then the war interrupted everything. Cendrars volunteered for the French forces in 1914. On 28 September 1915, fighting in Champagne, he was gravely wounded and his right arm was amputated. Yet rue de Savoie remained part of his life: by June 1916, out of the hospitals, he was back in the attic. The address had now known two radically different versions of Cendrars — the young two-handed poet launching himself into the Paris avant-garde, and the wounded veteran learning to write and live with his left hand.[1]

Once, I stayed seven days in bed in my attic on the rue de Savoie.

Une fois, je suis resté sept jours couché dans ma mansarde de la rue de Savoie.

The postwar room could be bleak. In Bourlinguer, Cendrars remembered those seven days in bed with nothing to drink, eat or even smoke, so disgusted at having come back from the war alive that he had sworn to beg from no one and not to go out again short of a miracle. He dates the memory to June 1916, seven flights up. Whatever liberties Cendrars sometimes took with autobiography, the passage gives an unusually raw image of what this address meant to him after the front.[6]

He kept coming back

Cendrars did not simply abandon the apartment in 1914. A postcard from September 1917 announces his return to Paris and gives 4 rue de Savoie as the address where his friends could find him. Correspondence from as late as April 1922 still carries the address. The Paris Review, introducing its long interview with him, put it simply: his home base was always Paris, for several years in the rue de Savoie, later in the avenue Montaigne.[7]

That qualification is very Cendrars. He had an address, but never only one home. Hotels, trains, ports, country houses and foreign cities continually pulled him away. Rue de Savoie was less a place that kept Cendrars still than a place he repeatedly came back to.[8]

The building remains residential today. There is no Cendrars museum here, yet few of his Paris addresses contain so much of his story: his emergence as Blaise Cendrars, his first independent publishing venture, his collaborations with the Paris avant-garde, the publication of the Transsibérien, his departure for war, and his difficult return from it.