5 Rue José-Maria-de-Heredia

On 25 August 1959, Blaise Cendrars and his wife, the actress Raymone Duchâteau, moved from 23 rue Jean-Dolent into a ground-floor apartment at 5 rue José-Maria-de-Heredia, near the École Militaire in the 7th arrondissement. It would be Cendrars's last home. By then his world had become dramatically smaller: a second stroke in the summer of 1958 had left him severely disabled and brought his literary writing effectively to an end. The chronology prepared with the Cendrars scholar Claude Leroy describes him at the time of the move as grabataire — bedridden or largely confined by illness.[1]

The 1959 notebook

There is an unusually intimate surviving record of this period. Among Cendrars's papers in the Swiss Literary Archives is his Mémento 1959, a small notebook containing everyday entries about money, royalty payments, correspondence, appointments with his masseur and the move to rue José-Maria-de-Heredia. The archive describes Cendrars's handwriting near the end of his life as hesitant and distorted, and when the notebook was catalogued, strands of tobacco were found between its pages.[2]

It is a striking survival from a writer whose books had been filled with trains, ships, foreign cities and constant movement: in his final year, his notes record the much smaller geography of illness and domestic life.

A street named for another poet

The address has an accidental literary resonance of its own. Rue José-Maria-de-Heredia was opened in 1909 and named for José-Maria de Heredia, the Cuban-born French poet and author of Les Trophées. Cendrars therefore spent his final months on a street already carrying another poet's name. There is no evidence that this influenced his decision to live there.[3]

The last honor

Cendrars was no longer producing major new literary work here, but his reputation was catching up with him. On 17 January 1961, he received the Grand Prix littéraire de la Ville de Paris. It was the great official literary recognition of his career, arriving extraordinarily late: Cendrars died at this apartment four days later, on 21 January 1961, aged seventy-three.[4]

It was an unusually quiet ending for a writer who had built his identity around movement. Cendrars had turned Russia, New York, the Trans-Siberian Railway, Brazil, ocean crossings and wartime France into literature. His last Paris address was instead a ground-floor apartment on a short residential street near the École Militaire. The great traveler had finally stopped traveling.

His last word?

Blaise Cendrars died murmuring: 'Build'

Blaise Cendrars est mort en murmurant : 'Construire'

Period newspapers reported that shortly before his death Cendrars murmured a final word: Construire — build. The story is preserved among the contemporary press clippings in the Blaise Cendrars archive. What survives is the contemporary reporting, not a bedside account.[4]