The grande école on the rue d'Ulm, behind the Panthéon — France's most selective humanities institution, and the building where Jean-Paul Sartre studied for the agrégation and Samuel Beckett arrived from Dublin in 1928 as a young English lecturer.
The École normale supérieure sits at 45 rue d'Ulm, behind the Panthéon. It is not a university in the ordinary sense: it takes a very small number of students by competitive examination, pays them, and has produced a disproportionate share of France's philosophers, scientists and public intellectuals for two centuries.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a student here in the 1920s, and it is where he prepared for the agrégation in philosophy — which he failed at the first attempt and then took again in 1929, placing first. The candidate who placed second was Simone de Beauvoir, who was not at the ENS: it did not admit women to the same track. That asymmetry is worth stating rather than smoothing, because it is the shape of the world The Second Sex was written about.
Samuel Beckett arrived from Trinity College Dublin in 1928 as lecteur d'anglais — an exchange post teaching English. He was twenty-two, and the two years he spent on the rue d'Ulm are the ones that made him a Paris writer rather than an Irish one: it was here that he fell in with the circle around James Joyce.
There is a violent footnote to Beckett's Paris that belongs on this page because of what came of it. He was stabbed in the street, nearly fatally, by a man who accosted him at random. Joyce arranged and paid for a private hospital room during his recovery, and the incident renewed a friendship that had cooled. The Dublin Evening Herald ran it as "Irishman stabbed in Paris".
The school is a working institution and not a visitor attraction. What you can do is stand on the rue d'Ulm and note that two of the twentieth century's least similar writers passed through the same door within a few years of each other.
Sartre studies at the ENS and prepares for the agrégation in philosophy.
Beckett arrives from Trinity College Dublin as lecteur d'anglais, and falls in with the Joyce circle.
Sartre places first in the agrégation; Beauvoir, who was not at the ENS, places second.
A grande école at 45 rue d'Ulm in the 5th arrondissement — France's most selective humanities institution. It admits a very small number of students by competitive examination and has produced a disproportionate share of the country's philosophers and public intellectuals.
Yes, in the 1920s, and it is where he prepared for the agrégation in philosophy. He failed it at the first attempt, sat it again in 1929, and placed first. Simone de Beauvoir placed second that year — but she was not at the ENS, which did not admit women to the same track.
Teaching. He came from Trinity College Dublin in 1928 as lecteur d'anglais, an exchange post, aged twenty-two. The two years turned him into a Paris writer: it was on the rue d'Ulm that he fell in with the circle around James Joyce.
Not really — it is a working school rather than a visitor site. The courtyard is sometimes accessible but the buildings are not. It is worth walking past on a Latin Quarter route, between the Panthéon and the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Worked here · 1928
Beckett arrived from Trinity College Dublin in 1928 as lecteur d'anglais, an exchange post teaching English, aged twenty-two. The two years on the rue d'Ulm are where he fell in with the circle around James Joyce and became a Paris writer.
Studied here
Sartre studied at the École normale supérieure in the 1920s and prepared for the agrégation in philosophy there — failing at the first attempt, then placing first in 1929.
A small cinema in the Latin Quarter, opened in 1926 as one of the first art-house screens in Paris, and the room where Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien andalou was first shown to the public in June 1929. It is still a working cinema.
Visit the place
The cheap Latin Quarter lodging house where Eric Blair lived for eighteen months before he was George Orwell, and the raw material for the Paris half of Down and Out in Paris and London.
Visit the place
An Alsatian restaurant with an upper room at the quiet end of the Boul' Mich' — where Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Sisley Huddleston talked for hours, and only the memoir remembers it.
Visit the place
The small square at the top of the rue Mouffetard, a minute from Ernest Hemingway's first flat — now one of the quarter's prettiest corners. The novel visits it after dark.
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.
