The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.

Street · Montmartre · 18e arrondissement

Rue des Trois Frères

The buildingStill standing
Getting inOutside only
What's there nowStill the same

The street is freely walkable, but Hughes's attic cannot be visited: he recorded no house number, and no private interior is identified or open.

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.

Address
Rue des Trois Frères, 75018 Paris
Years
Laid out in the 1840s; present name from the Dufour brothers
IllustrationColor present-day view down rue des Trois Frères with pale façades, cobbles and a small café terrace

Rue des Trois Frères today. No doorway is singled out because Hughes recorded the street but no house number.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

Rue des Trois Frères crosses the southern slope of Montmartre below Sacré-Cœur. It is a public street rather than a single literary house: visitors can walk its full length among nineteenth-century apartment fronts, newer infill, small shops and the changing gradients of the hill. The map marker sits at street level rather than on a doorway, because no trustworthy house number survives for the story attached to it.

The street was laid out in the 1840s as rue Léonie and later took its present name from the three Dufour brothers, local property owners. City heritage research dates surviving buildings on part of the street to the same mid-nineteenth-century development. That mixed fabric matters: this is not a preserved stage set, but an inhabited Montmartre street whose old scale is still readable.

Langston Hughes, a young American poet who would become a central writer of the Harlem Renaissance, moved somewhere on this street later in 1924 after leaving his attic at 15 rue Nollet. In The Big Sea, his 1940 autobiography, he calls the new room another attic chamber, higher on the hill toward Sacré-Cœur. He gives the street but no number, so no particular doorway can honestly be claimed as his.

One useful correction keeps the two attics distinct. Alain Locke—the philosopher and editor who was assembling work that became The New Negro—visited Hughes at rue Nollet just before the move, not here. Rue des Trois Frères still marks the same turning point in Hughes's Paris year, but it should not inherit the earlier room's famous visitor.

Key facts

What it is
A Montmartre street laid out in the 1840s
The name
For the three Dufour brothers, property owners in the neighborhood
Langston Hughes
Rented an attic room somewhere on the street in 1924
Precision
Street-level only — Hughes recorded no house number
Today
Open and walkable below Sacré-Cœur
Visiting
Free public street; no house interior or exact Hughes doorway is identified

In images

The same street-level view in black and white.Editorial illustration
Rue des Trois Frères today. No doorway is singled out because Hughes recorded the street but no house number.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1840s

    The street is laid out, initially as rue Léonie.

  2. Mid-19th century

    Apartment buildings rise along the new street as Montmartre develops.

  3. 1924

    Langston Hughes moves into an attic chamber somewhere on the street.

  4. Today

    The public street remains walkable, but Hughes's exact doorway is unknown.

On the map

Related books

Cover of The Big Sea by Langston Hughes

Recalled in the memoir

The Big Sea

Langston Hughes · 1940

Hughes says he moved to another attic chamber on the Street of the Three Brothers, high on the hill toward Sacré-Cœur, without giving a number.

Writers who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

American · American poet at the center of the Harlem Renaissance. He spent most of 1924 in Montmartre, washing dishes at the Grand Duc nightclub, and told the story in his memoir The Big Sea.

Lived here · 1924

Later in 1924 Hughes moved to another attic chamber somewhere on this street, higher on the Montmartre hill toward Sacré-Cœur; he did not record a house number.

— Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940), Paris in the Spring chapter

Within walking distance

Color present-day view of 18 rue des Trois-Frères

Apartment · Montmartre (18th)

18 rue des Trois-Frères

The Montmartre address where the Pissarro family lodged in November 1878, and where Julie Pissarro gave birth — the subject of the pastel At the Window, rue des Trois-Frères.

Visit the place
Color street view of the white façade, pale shutters and zinc studio windows at 49 rue Gabrielle

Apartment · Montmartre

49 rue Gabrielle

Where Pablo Picasso set up his first studio in Paris, in 1900, at the age of eighteen — four years before the Bateau-Lavoir and seven before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Visit the place
Color present-day view of Place du Tertre with artists, café terraces and low Montmartre façades under a blue sky

Square · Montmartre

Place du Tertre

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
Present-day café tables, visitors and artists on the sunlit cobbles of the place du Tertre

Quarter · Montmartre

Montmartre

The hill north of Paris that was a separate village until 1860 and an artists' quarter until the First World War — the district of Van Gogh's two Paris years, Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, the Bateau-Lavoir and the Moulin Rouge.

Visit the place
References

References

The sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document Rue des Trois Frères, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.

  1. 1The Big Sea

    Memoir
    Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1940
    Used for

    First-person evidence and historical context used in preparing the Rue des Trois Frères page.

    View source

  2. 2Commission du Vieux Paris: 32–32 bis, rue des Trois Frères

    Archive
    Ville de Paris, Commission du Vieux Paris, 2020
    Used for

    Archival evidence used to document the historical record connected to Rue des Trois Frères.

    View source

  1. 3OpenStreetMap

    Map data
    Used for

    Map data used to verify addresses, geographic coordinates, and the placement associated with Rue des Trois Frères.

    View source

  2. 4Nomenclature officielle des voies de Paris — dénominations des emprises des voies actuelles

    Official record
    Ville de Paris (Direction de l'urbanisme, service de la topographie)
    Used for

    Official record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.

    View source
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Why these sources are here

These references provide the documented foundation for this page's history and context. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.

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