Arrondissement 1
Number: 18
The short, narrow road existed already in 1640 when it was named after a Monsieur Sage from La Sourdière, whose house and gardens it ran by.
Daniel Stern (Countess Marie d’Agoult) and Franz Liszt first lived together in this narrow Paris road in 1833.
In February 1935 Aragon and ElsaTriolet moved into No. 18. They lived in one of the flats off the still-existing courtyard there until Aragon was called up as a medical reservist in September 1939.
As the political disagreements between Breton and Aragon deepened from 1929 onwards an emergency meeting of the organisers of the International Writers Conference took place there that brought them to a head. Breton had smacked Ilya Ehrenburg across the face for having written that all surrealists were ‘pedarists’, and the Conference committee on June 14 1935 decided to exclude Breton from the official speakers.
