Place du Tertre

The place, briefly

Place du Tertre is the compact historic square near the summit of Montmartre, just west of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre and a short walk from Sacré-Cœur. It is public and freely walkable. Restaurant terraces fill much of its perimeter, while the City of Paris assigns regulated spaces in the center to painters, portraitists, caricaturists and silhouette artists. The square is heavily visited; early morning gives the clearest view of its shape, while later hours show the artists at work.

Formed in the fifteenth century, the square takes its name from its position on the hill—tertre means a small rise or mound. Montmartre's town hall occupied number 3 from 1790. The artists now associated with the square are managed through a municipal authorization system rather than an informal free-for-all: painters share small allocated pitches and alternate their use.

The documentary photographer Eugène Atget photographed Place du Tertre in 1924. That makes his image an unusually direct comparison with the year Langston Hughes came here. Hughes was a young American poet who would become a central voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Anne Marie Coussey, whom he called Mary, was an English-Nigerian student he met in Paris through the historian Rayford Logan. They fell in love during the spring.

When a representative of Coussey's father came to return her to England, the couple arranged one last dinner far from the Latin Quarter, in a little restaurant somewhere on this square. Hughes never gave its name. No present-day restaurant can therefore be advertised as the room where they ate, and the honest landmark is the square itself.

Hughes remembered the menu: wine, veal shoulder, a seasonal salad and cœur à la crème. Afterwards they walked down the winding streets of the hill and across the boulevard de Clichy, bought wild strawberries and little jars of cream, and returned to Hughes's attic at 15 rue Nollet to watch the sun set over the chimney pots.

Hughes later recorded the evening in The Big Sea, his 1940 autobiography. The compact geography of their walk remains legible: from the hilltop square down Montmartre, across boulevard de Clichy and west toward rue Nollet. The romance belongs to Hughes and Coussey; the address belongs to a public square that has accumulated many other lives before and since.