The house west of Paris where Aldous and Maria Huxley lived from October 1928 to April 1930. They told D. H. Lawrence to take Lady Chatterley's Lover to Paris, put him up for a week mid-visit, and got him to a doctor.
Huxley met Lawrence in 1915 and spent the rest of Lawrence's life in his orbit. He put a version of him into Point Counter Point in 1928 as the character Mark Rampion, which Lawrence read and disliked. The two men were opposites in almost every respect that usually matters: Eton and Balliol against a Nottinghamshire mining village, satire against prophecy, an ironist against a man with no irony in him at all.
Maria Huxley did much of the practical work of the friendship. She typed part of Lady Chatterley's Lover. She and Aldous were with the Lawrences at Vence at the end, and it was to Huxley that the job of editing the letters fell in 1932.
Suresnes in 1929 was a river suburb with factories along the Seine and villas on the slope behind, twenty minutes from the centre and a world away from Montparnasse. The Huxleys took the house at 3 rue du Bac in October 1928 and kept it until April 1930, which makes it the address they held throughout the year Lawrence was dying.
Lawrence came out for a week in the middle of his Paris month, leaving the hotel on boulevard du Montparnasse and the negotiations behind him. His verdict on the suburb was that it was sleepy and dull. He was not an easy houseguest anywhere, and he was very ill.
The doctor's appointment the Huxleys arranged is the part worth holding onto. Lawrence had been refusing the diagnosis for years, calling it bronchial trouble and a weak chest, and travelling towards warm weather as though climate were treatment. He went back into Paris, settled the contract for the cheap edition on 5 April, left for the Mediterranean two days later, and died at Vence on 2 March 1930.
Last verified: August 2026.
Aldous Huxley meets D. H. Lawrence; the friendship lasts until Lawrence's death.
Huxley publishes Point Counter Point, whose Mark Rampion draws on Lawrence.
In October the Huxleys take the house at 3 rue du Bac, Suresnes, with their son Matthew.
The Huxleys, living at Suresnes, tell Lawrence to take Lady Chatterley's Lover to Paris.
Lawrence spends a week here in March and is taken to the Huxleys' doctor.
The Huxleys are at Vence at the end; Lawrence dies there on 2 March.
In April they give up the Suresnes house and move south to Sanary-sur-Mer.
Huxley edits the first published collection of Lawrence's letters.
Because Aldous and Maria Huxley were living there. They were his closest friends at the end of his life, and he spent a week at their house in the middle of the month he spent in Paris in March 1929. He found the suburb sleepy and dull.
The Huxleys. French publication law did not police foreign-language books the way British and American law did, and the city had a set of small English-language presses that existed for books the trade would not touch. Lawrence took the advice and came in March 1929.
At 3 rue du Bac, from October 1928 until April 1930. The address is recorded in the Aldous Huxley Archive's chronology of his life. A house stands at the number today, but whether it is the one they rented, or a later building on the same plot, has not been established.
Close enough that Maria Huxley typed part of Lady Chatterley's Lover, that both Huxleys were at Vence when Lawrence died in March 1930, and that Aldous edited the first collection of his letters in 1932. They had almost nothing in common as writers, which seems to have been part of it.
No. Nothing is marked and the address is not pinned to a building. Suresnes is worth a visit for the Mont Valérien, which holds the memorial to those executed there under the Occupation and the American cemetery, but not for Lawrence.
Frequented by · 1929
He spent a week with Aldous and Maria Huxley in the middle of his Paris month, and they arranged for him to see their doctor. He found the suburb sleepy and dull. It was the Huxleys who had sent him to Paris in the first place.
The Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
