5 rue Victor-Massé

The place, briefly

Stefan Zweig had just finished a doctorate on the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine when he came to Paris and took rooms here in November 1904. He was twenty-three. He stayed until the following June.

It is the Paris year that matters in his writing. Zweig was not a resident of the city in any long sense — Vienna, and later exile, take up most of his life — but this stretch became one of the set-pieces of The World of Yesterday, the memoir he finished just before his death in 1942. What he describes is a young man's Paris: cheap, sociable, and open in a way he believed, wrongly, was permanent.

The lasting result was a friendship. Around this period Zweig met the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, whose work he translated into German and promoted for years afterwards. In 1914 he was back in Paris meeting his publisher Anton Kippenberg along with Rainer Maria Rilke, Romain Rolland and Léon Bazalgette to plan a collected edition of Verhaeren — a gathering of an Austrian, a Bohemian-Austrian, two Frenchmen and a German publisher, arranging the works of a Belgian, weeks before the war that ended that whole arrangement.

The street has a second literary tenant worth knowing about. Edgar Degas kept his principal studio at number 37, a few doors up, for around twenty-five years — though he was forced out in 1912, seven years after Zweig left. In Zweig's time both addresses were on the rue de Laval; the renaming came later.