The Salon on the Avenue Charles Floquet

The place, briefly

The avenues flanking the Champ de Mars were the Right Bank's answer to the Left Bank salon — apartments with drawing rooms large enough for a recital and hostesses adventurous enough to fill them with the avant-garde. It was to one of these, the home of Mrs. Christian Gross on the Avenue Charles Floquet, that invitations went out for one of the era's odder evenings: the poet Ezra Pound, presenting himself as a composer.

Huddleston, who had been astonished by the announcement that Pound had 'turned musician,' went along to hear the Quatre Chansons du Testament — François Villon's poems in Pound's settings, the seed of the opera Le Testament de Villon that would later be performed with hired halls and early instruments. The drawing-room audience got the first hearing; whatever they expected of a poet's music, Pound's researches into troubadour song were serious, and the work has been revived by early-music ensembles ever since.

The salon itself, like most private rooms of the era, kept no records — no number survives in the memoir, and the map pin marks the avenue rather than a door. It stands here for the whole species: the invitation-only rooms where the era's experiments were auditioned before they faced the public.