Adrienne Monnier

Adrienne Monnier was Paris-born and shop-made: the daughter of Clovis Monnier, a postal clerk who sorted mail through the night on moving trains. In November 1913 a rail crash left her father with a lifelong limp — and when the compensation came through, all ten thousand francs of it went to his daughter, to set her up in books. She opened La Maison des Amis des Livres at 7 rue de l'Odéon on 15 November 1915, in the middle of the war, at twenty-three — one of the first women in France to found a bookshop of her own. The name was the program: a house of friends, built around a subscription lending library, so that reading did not depend on buying.

The two rooms became the salon of modern French letters — readings and conversation that kept Gide, Valéry, and Larbaud among the faithful, with Colette, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, and a young Simone de Beauvoir on the lending cards. In 1917 an American student named Sylvia Beach walked in; the friendship became the partnership of both their lives, and when Beach's Shakespeare and Company crossed to No. 12 in 1921, the rue de l'Odéon — Larbaud's 'Odéonia' — ran as one institution with two doors, French letters on one side and English on the other.

She was a publisher and a writer as much as a bookseller. It was her shop that staged the 7 December 1921 séance at which Larbaud introduced Ulysses to Paris; her review Le Navire d'Argent (1925–26) printed Prufrock in French — translated by Monnier and Beach themselves — and gave Hemingway his first appearance in the language; in 1929 she published the French Ulysse from the shop. Her own writing ran through it all: the first-person 'gazettes' she began in the Navire and revived as La Gazette des Amis des Livres (1938–40) are some of the era's best eyewitness prose.

Through the Occupation her shop stayed open — Beach's closed and Beach was interned, but the French house kept lending books to a city that needed them. Monnier closed the shop in 1951, after thirty-six years. In September 1954 she was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, a disorder of the inner ear that brought vertigo, deafness, and auditory hallucinations. By the last months she could no longer read or write. She died by suicide on 19 June 1955, from an overdose of sleeping pills, at sixty-three. The posthumous collection Rue de l'Odéon (1960) preserves the street in her own voice, and when the Paris council voted her a plaque it called her the 'sainte patronne des libraires' — the patron saint of booksellers.