The Montmartre flat Louis-Ferdinand Céline kept for twelve years, and the desk behind both of his novels — Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan were written at this address.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline took the flat at 98 rue Lepic in 1929, the year Dr Louis Destouches joined the founding team of the new municipal dispensary at Clichy. He kept it for twelve years, longer than any other address in his life. The arrangement that produced the books was set here and did not change: the surgery in the day, the writing at night, under his grandmother's name.
Journey to the End of the Night was published in 1932 and is the reason the address matters. Céline wrote it in a register borrowed from speech rather than from literary French — slang, interruption, the suspension points that became his signature — and ran the whole book through a single narrating voice until the voice, not the plot, was carrying it. Readers argued about the manner immediately, which is a fair measure of how far it sat from what a French novel was expected to sound like.
Death on the Installment Plan followed in 1936 and went back to the childhood in the Passage Choiseul. The style went further than the first book had: sentences broken into fragments, the ellipsis doing work that grammar normally does, the pitch held high for six hundred pages. It is the more extreme of the two, and the one later writers tended to name when they were describing what they had taken from him.
He left in March 1941 for a fifth-floor flat at 4 rue Girardon, a few streets across the Butte. The building on rue Lepic stands, its ground floor now a gallery with the door open to the street.
Takes the flat, the same year he joins the new dispensary at Clichy.
Journey to the End of the Night is published, written at this address.
Death on the Installment Plan follows, returning to the passage Choiseul childhood.
Leaves in March for 4 rue Girardon, a few streets away on the Butte.
The building stands, its ground floor trading as a gallery.
Lived here · 1929–1941
The longest tenancy of his life and the desk behind both novels — Journey to the End of the Night in 1932 and Death on the Installment Plan in 1936 were written here, in the years he was practising at the Clichy dispensary.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Montmartre apartment during the Occupation — where Gen Paul came up from his studio a few doors away, and where the manuscripts later famous as 'the lost trove' were left behind in June 1944.
Visit the place
Montmartre's historic hilltop square, now shared by restaurant terraces and licensed artists—and the setting of Langston Hughes and Anne Marie Coussey's last Paris dinner together in 1924.
Visit the place
A freely walkable nineteenth-century Montmartre street of slopes, cobbles and apartment façades, and the deliberately imprecise location of Langston Hughes's second Paris attic in 1924.
Visit the place
Where Colette's 1907 mime with her lover Mathilde de Morny set off a riot and was banned by the police — her most notorious Paris performance.
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.
