The address of the Auberge de la Ferme, the small restaurant where George Orwell took his second Paris kitchen job in 1929 — the chaotic, filthy kitchen that fills the second half of Down and Out in Paris and London under the invented name "Auberge de Jehan Cottard". Identified by archival research in 2021.
The long central stretch of Down and Out in Paris and London is set in a restaurant George Orwell calls the Auberge de Jehan Cottard: a new place, opened on borrowed money, with a kitchen the size of a cupboard, no proper drainage, and a proprietor improvising his way past every health rule in Paris. It is the book's most sustained piece of reporting and its funniest and worst material at once.
The name is invented and so is the street Orwell gives it. He places the restaurant on the rue du Commerce. It was not there.
Four years of archival work by the researcher Duncan Roberts, carried out between 2017 and 2021, identified the real establishment as the Auberge de la Ferme, at 72 rue Fondary in the fifteenth arrondissement — a few streets from the address Orwell published.
There is a detail worth putting beside that. Orwell also disguised the hospital he was treated in, calling it the "Hôpital X" and placing it in the fifteenth arrondissement, when Hôpital Cochin is in the fourteenth. The fifteenth is where this restaurant actually was. Whether he moved the hospital deliberately or simply carried the wrong arrondissement over from the kitchen he had been working in, the effect is the same: the published geography of Down and Out is shifted about a mile from the real one, and consistently.
Nothing survives to see. The building that held the auberge is gone, and the block standing at the address today was put up in 1978. What is left is the street, the number, and the knowledge that a great deal of the book happened at it.
Orwell works as a plongeur at the Auberge de la Ferme, 72 rue Fondary.
Down and Out in Paris and London is published, relocating the restaurant to the rue du Commerce and renaming it the Auberge de Jehan Cottard.
The present residential block is built on the site.
Duncan Roberts's archival research identifies the Auberge de la Ferme at this address.
The Auberge de la Ferme. Orwell invented the name "Auberge de Jehan Cottard" for Down and Out in Paris and London and also moved it, placing it on the rue du Commerce. Archival research by Duncan Roberts, completed in 2021, identified the real restaurant at 72 rue Fondary in the fifteenth arrondissement.
You can stand at the address, but there is nothing of the restaurant left. The building that housed it is gone and the residential block there now was built in 1978. It is a site for the record rather than a visit.
He disguised most of the Paris book's real places — the restaurant, the hospital, the hotel he washed dishes in. It is worth noticing that he put the "Hôpital X" in the fifteenth arrondissement when the hospital was in the fourteenth, and that the fifteenth is where this restaurant actually stood. The published geography is shifted, and consistently so.
Worked here · 1929
Orwell's second Paris kitchen job, as a plongeur at the Auberge de la Ferme — the restaurant he renamed the "Auberge de Jehan Cottard" and relocated to the rue du Commerce in Down and Out in Paris and London. Identified at this address by Duncan Roberts's archival research, 2017-2021.
A seventh-floor walk-up near the Champ-de-Mars where Richard Osborn gave the almost penniless Henry Miller a room through the winter of 1930–31 — the hungriest stretch of his first Paris year.
Visit the place
Blaise Cendrars's final home — the ground-floor apartment in the 7th arrondissement he moved to in August 1959 and where he died on 21 January 1961.
Visit the place
The drawing room by the Champ de Mars where Ezra Pound the composer made his debut — the Villon songs, heard by invitation before anyone believed he'd really done it.
Visit the placeThe 27-metre fire-stair tower Keith Haring painted freehand for the children of Hôpital Necker in April and May 1987 — his permanent Paris work, restored after a six-year conservation campaign.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
