Claude Debussy
Debussy attended Stephane Mallarme's Tuesday gatherings on the rue de Rome and drew directly on Mallarme's poetry, most famously for the Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune.
Mallarmé's salon, 89 rue de Rome
Still standing
Outside only
Someone else
The small flat where Stéphane Mallarmé held the Tuesday evenings that drew most of literary and musical Paris — Debussy among them, and the source of the poem behind his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.
- 89 rue de Rome, 75017 Paris
- Stéphane Mallarmé's Tuesday gatherings, from the 1880s until his death in 1898
The place, briefly
Mallarmé taught English for a living and lived modestly. What he had instead of money was Tuesday evening: a weekly gathering in a small flat on the rue de Rome, where he talked and everyone else largely listened. Over the years the room drew Verlaine, Valéry, Gide, Yeats, Whistler and a long list of others, and it became one of the most consequential rooms in European letters.
Claude Debussy attended, and the connection went well beyond sociability. Mallarmé's poetry gave him the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, the orchestral piece of 1894 that is as close as music has to a hinge between the nineteenth century and the twentieth, and later the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé.
The relationship between Symbolist poetry and Debussy's music is the essential context for everything he wrote. Both were after suggestion rather than statement — mood, implication and shifting colour instead of clear narrative argument — and the Tuesdays on the rue de Rome are where that idea was worked out in conversation.
The building is private.
Key facts
- Stéphane Mallarmé's, on Tuesday evenings
- Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, and the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé
- Verlaine, Valéry, Gide, Yeats and Whistler among many
- With Mallarmé's death in 1898
- Private — exterior only
Timeline
Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, after Mallarmé's poem, is first performed.
Mallarmé dies and the Tuesdays end.
On the map
Questions before you go
What were Mallarmé's Tuesdays?
Weekly evening gatherings at his flat on the rue de Rome, attended over the years by a large part of literary and artistic Paris, including Debussy.
How did Mallarmé influence Debussy?
Directly. Mallarmé's poem gave Debussy the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune of 1894, and he later set the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
15 rue Nollet
A surviving private address in Batignolles where a vanished working people's hotel gave the young American poet Langston Hughes his real-life version of a Paris garret in 1924.
Visit the place4 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg
Manet's studio through the 1870s, whose windows looked down on what was then the rue Mosnier — the street he painted repeatedly, flags and all, in the summer of 1878.
Visit the place39 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg
The apartment Édouard Manet moved to in 1878 and remained associated with until his death in 1883, in the last years when illness had reduced what he could physically paint.
Visit the place
Place de Clichy
The crossroads where four arrondissements collide — and where Louis-Ferdinand Céline opens Journey to the End of the Night at a café table, with a recruitment parade passing and his narrator Bardamu jumping up to join the war.
Visit the placeThe 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.