Rue Lepic

[For Step Two of the Gertrude Stein Pilgrimmage, please see my entry at: France > Ile de France > Paris > Place De L’Odéon.]

As she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I cannot imagine Gertrude Stein’s intention in providing a detailed account of the route that she and the eponymous Alice B. took to Picasso’s early studio in Montmartre. Could she have imagined that someone such as I would respond to it as a sort of siren’s song and retrace their very steps? Such was the very project at hand, or at foot, more literally and, uhm, literarily.

Arriving in Montmartre, Stein explains that at “the place Blanche …. we got out [of the omnibus] and climbed a steep street lined with shops with things to eat, the rue Lepic, and then turning we went around a corner and climbed even more steeply in fact almost straight up ….”

It took a bit of educated guesswork and an enormous and archly detailed map of Paris to locate Rue Lepic, but soon we were negotiating it on foot, confirming Stein’s assertions about the steepness of the grade. Mounting excitement over the prospect of finding ourselves standing before Picasso’s early studio kept our motivation high and our pace steady.

[For Step Four of the Gertrude Stein Pilgrimmage, please see my entry at: France > Ile de France > Paris > Montmartre > Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso's Residence And Studio, 1904 – 1909.]