The house in Auteuil where Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871 — at the time a village on the western edge of Paris rather than a city street, and the address his family had retreated to during the upheaval of the Commune.
Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871 at 96 rue La Fontaine, in Auteuil. The street is now the rue Jean de La Fontaine and Auteuil is the sixteenth arrondissement, but neither of those things was true when he arrived.
Auteuil was a village that had been absorbed into Paris only eleven years earlier, in the 1860 expansion, and still read as somewhere outside the city — gardens, low houses, quiet. The house belonged to his mother's family. The Prousts were there rather than in the centre because of what the centre had just been through: the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris, and then the Commune and its suppression in the spring of 1871. Proust was born about two months after the last week of fighting.
The family soon moved into the eighth arrondissement proper, to 9 boulevard Malesherbes, where they stayed for twenty-seven years. Auteuil remained a place he was taken back to as a child, and the memory of a garden in a semi-rural quarter on the edge of the city is one of the things his novel is built out of.
There is nothing to see. It is a private address on an ordinary street, and the building is not what it was. It is here as the first point on the map — the western edge, before everything moves east into the eighth.
Auteuil is absorbed into Paris as part of the city's expansion.
The Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris, and the Commune; the Proust family is out of the centre.
Marcel Proust is born at 96 rue La Fontaine, Auteuil.
The family settles at 9 boulevard Malesherbes in the 8th arrondissement.
At 96 rue La Fontaine in Auteuil, on 10 July 1871. The street is now called the rue Jean de La Fontaine and the area is the 16th arrondissement, but in 1871 Auteuil still read as a village on the western edge of Paris, absorbed into the city only eleven years earlier.
The house belonged to his mother's family, and the family was out of the centre because of what the centre had just been through — the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris, and the Commune and its suppression in spring 1871. Proust was born roughly two months after the fighting ended.
No. It is a private address on an ordinary street in the 16th, with nothing marking it and altered fabric. It matters as the first point on a Proust map rather than as a visit — everything else in his Paris lies east of here, in the 8th.
Lived here · 1871
Proust was born here on 10 July 1871, in his mother's family's house in Auteuil — then a recently absorbed village on the western edge of Paris, where the family had been during the war, the siege and the Commune. They moved to 9 boulevard Malesherbes soon after.
Colette's long Auteuil home through the end of her second marriage — the address just before the Palais-Royal.
Visit the place
The former townhouse of the Duc de Valmy at the edge of the Ranelagh gardens, bought by Jules Marmottan in 1882 and opened as a museum in 1934.
Visit the place
The wooden Swiss-style chalet in Passy, since demolished, where Colette lived through her second marriage and the birth of her daughter.
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.
