Rue des Trois Frères

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 Atlas marker is deliberately placed at street level 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.