The municipal school Louis-Ferdinand Céline attended from 1900 to 1905, two minutes' walk from the family shop in the Passage Choiseul — the first classroom of the boy then registered as Louis-Ferdinand Destouches.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was registered here on 1 October 1900, aged six, under his real name, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches. The school sits on rue de Louvois beside the square of the same name, a short walk from the Passage Choiseul where his mother kept her shop and the family lived above it. He could reach it in a couple of minutes without leaving the quarter.
It is an ordinary Paris communal school of the Third Republic and looks the part: pale brick, Ville de Paris cut into the stone above the windows, liberté égalité fraternité across the frieze. That ordinariness is the point of the address. The prose that later broke French literary syntax was learned first in a state classroom teaching the standard written language to the children of shopkeepers.
He left on 27 February 1905 for Saint-Joseph des Tuileries, a private Catholic school in the 1st, and the family stayed in the passage two years more. The building on rue de Louvois is still a school, so it can be looked at from the pavement and no further.
Registered on 1 October, aged six, while the family is living in the Passage Choiseul.
Leaves on 27 February for Saint-Joseph des Tuileries.
The family gives up the passage; the quarter stops being his.
Death on the Installment Plan returns to this childhood, the passage rebuilt as the Passage des Bérésinas.
Still a school. The façade is the whole of what a visitor can see.
Studied here · 1900–1905
Registered on 1 October 1900, aged six, and there until 27 February 1905, when he left for Saint-Joseph des Tuileries. The school is a short walk from the Passage Choiseul, where the family was living above his mother's shop.
The covered arcade where Louis-Ferdinand Céline grew up over his mother's lace shop — reborn in his novel Death on the Installment Plan as the Passage des Bérésinas, the gaslit 'gas jar' of its narrator Ferdinand's childhood.
Visit the place
The Palais-Royal restaurant Colette favored in her last years, a few doors from her apartment. A brass plaque still marks her seat.
Visit the place
A glass-roofed 1820s shopping arcade near the Palais-Royal, and home to the bookshop the City of Paris calls Colette's haunt.
Visit the place
Colette's home above the Palais-Royal garden, and the address that made her its dame. She lived here from 1938 until her death in 1954.
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.
