Apartment · Odéon / Luxembourg · 6e arrondissement

58 Rue de Vaugirard

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowPrivate flats

The building stands opposite the Luxembourg Gardens; the flat was the Murphys' lease before it was the Fitzgeralds' address.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's Left Bank apartment in the summer of 1928, facing the Luxembourg Gardens — the address of Zelda's ballet discipline and Scott's stalled novel.

Address: 58 Rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris
Years: April–August 1928

Illustration 58 rue de Vaugirard today — pale stone, white shutters, and round-studded wooden carriage doors

Number 58 today, a few steps from the gardens' railings.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

When the Fitzgeralds came back to Paris in April 1928, they landed, for once, on the Left Bank: a fourth-floor apartment at 58 rue de Vaugirard, directly opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. The flat came through their closest friends in France — Gerald and Sara Murphy had leased it while waiting for their art-deco penthouse at 14 rue Guynemer to be finished, and it stood empty. Scottie, six that summer, had the gardens across the street; Gertrude Stein's pavilion on the rue de Fleurus was a five-minute walk one way, and the cafés of Montparnasse ten minutes the other.

The address belongs, more than anything, to Zelda. That mid-summer she began training under Lubov Egorova, the former Ballets Russes ballerina who ran a celebrated studio school, and threw herself at classical ballet with a seriousness that alarmed everyone who watched — hours of daily practice at an age, twenty-seven going on twenty-eight, when professional dancers are finishing rather than starting. She insisted on paying Egorova with money from her own magazine writing, not Scott's. It was the discipline of a woman carving out work that was hers alone, and it is the reason this address matters to her story.

Scott's summer ran the other way. The Great Gatsby was three years behind him, the next novel would not come, and the season's drinking got him arrested more than once — with the nightclub owner Bricktop among those who bailed him out. In October the family sailed home to America. They would be back in Paris the following spring — but the rue de Vaugirard flat was the last address of the era the marriage still worked on its old terms; Zelda's breakdown came in the spring of 1930, in the city they had returned to.

Key facts

Lived here: April – August 1928, Scott, Zelda, and Scottie Fitzgerald
What it was: Fourth-floor flat leased by Gerald and Sara Murphy, standing empty when the Fitzgeralds arrived
Neighborhood: Facing the Luxembourg Gardens, between Odéon and the rue de Fleurus
The moment: Zelda begins daily ballet training under Lubov Egorova in mid-summer 1928
Today: The building stands opposite the gardens' railings

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of 58 rue de Vaugirard, great studded carriage doors between rows of shuttered windows — The carriage doors at number 58, across from the Luxembourg Gardens.Editorial illustration

58 rue de Vaugirard today — pale stone, white shutters, and round-studded wooden carriage doors — Number 58 today, a few steps from the gardens' railings.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1928
The Fitzgeralds arrive from America in April and take over the Murphys' empty flat.
1928
In mid-summer Zelda begins ballet training with Lubov Egorova, practicing daily and paying for the lessons with her own writing.
1928
The family returns to America on October 7, to Ellerslie in Delaware.
1929–30
The Fitzgeralds return to Paris the next spring; Zelda's collapse comes in April 1930, and the ballet years end.
Today
The building faces the Luxembourg Gardens as it did — the gardens Scottie played in are unchanged.

On the map

Writers who knew this place

F. Scott Fitzgerald

American · The Jazz Age's laureate — famous at twenty-three, author of Gatsby at twenty-eight, and owner of the longest posthumous comeback in American letters.

Lived here · 1928

The fourth-floor flat opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, taken over from Gerald and Sara Murphy's empty lease for the summer of 1928 — a stalled-novel season that ended with the family sailing home in October.

— A Fitzgerald Chronology — Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald; John Baxter, John Baxter — A Plaque for Scott and Zelda

Zelda Fitzgerald

American · Novelist, painter, and the Jazz Age's other Fitzgerald — the subject of A Moveable Feast's most disputed portrait.

Lived here · 1928

The address of Zelda's ballet summer — from this flat facing the Luxembourg Gardens she began daily training under Lubov Egorova in mid-1928, paying for the lessons with her own magazine writing.

— A Fitzgerald Chronology — Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald; John Baxter, John Baxter — A Plaque for Scott and Zelda

Within walking distance

Square · Saint-Germain-des-Prés / Odéon

Place Saint-Sulpice

The quiet square between Saint-Germain and the Luxembourg — the fountain, the pigeons, the towered church, and a stillness three generations of writers noticed.

Visit the place

Salon · Notre-Dame-des-Champs / Luxembourg

27 Rue de Fleurus

Gertrude Stein's apartment and salon — the drawing room of modernism, where Ernest Hemingway was instructed, encouraged, and eventually indicted as part of a lost generation.

Visit the place

Café · Odéon

Le Tournon

The café below the Senate that served as the unofficial headquarters of Black American writers in postwar Paris, with Richard Wright at the center and James Baldwin among the regulars.

Visit the place

Park · Odéon / Luxembourg

Jardin du Luxembourg

Ernest Hemingway's daily shortcut and his hungry-day refuge — the park where he walked to avoid the smell of food, and studied the Cézannes in its museum on an empty stomach.

Visit the place

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.