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One dire day, Domenica’s resentment of Jean-Pierre finally curdled into rage. She attacked him for disgracing her house. He was not even her or Paul Guillaume’s son, she said, adding that his real mother, according to Trystram, “must have ended up on the streets after being knocked up by some wretched delivery boy.” He was a foundling she had adopted out of kindness. In despair Jean-Pierre fled to the apartment of Walter’s son, Jacques. He worked briefly in a Paris night-club, in a pharmaceutical factory, and as a film extra. In 1955 he enlisted in the army as a parachutist and was soon commissioned. Jean Walter saw him off to war in Algiers and made him promise that he would come back and live at home after his military service. His thoughtful mother reportedly asked her friend General Massu, who was in command of the troops in Algiers, to expose Jean-Pierre to active combat and make a man of him. Since she sent him no money, he was reduced to bouncing checks and stealing 80,000 francs from the regimental mess—transgressions which would later be used to justify the conspiracy she mounted against him.

Domenica would always take much too much credit for preserving the integrity of her first husband’s collection—“It is my raison d’être,” she used to say. In fact, she had never liked the art nègre, which had been Guillaume’s first love. After promising his collection of tribal art to the Louvre, she auctioned it off. No less regrettable is the absence from the collection of de Chirico, whom Guillaume had helped discover. Domenica was legally entitled to sell whatever she wanted, but one wishes she had deaccessioned some of her husband’s mistakes—those late Renoir nudes painted in shades of apricot jam, or the pretty-pretty Marie Laurencins, or the ghastly Goergs—instead of eliminating his best modernist paintings, including all but one of his great early Picassos and his two most important Matisses, the huge Bathers by a River (1909–16), now in Chicago’s Art In

For as long as I can remember, I have had a fascination with the École Normale Supérieure. So many French philosophers I have read about have studied there. Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Hyppolite, Althusser, Beauvoir. In fact, Sartre and Beauvoir first met here in 1929, when both were studying for the agrégation, France’s toughest exam for want-to-be-philosophers. Throughout the twentieth century, this most elite of Paris’s educational institutions has been a breeding ground for new bold new ideas, a hotbed of -isms, including existentialism, humanism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism and more recently, postmodernism.

Naturally, when I was in recently in Paris doing research on the lives of French philosophers for my book Lovers of Philosophy, I wanted to visit the place where so many prominent continental philosophers developed their initial ideas. So, along with my 14-year-old daughter Alex who was travelling with me, I found myself cycling through the Latin Quarter in search of this esteemed institution. It’s usually more fun looking for places that are off the tourist track when travelling, and this journey was no exception. Before long, we found ourselves on the Rue d’Ulm, a narrow tree-lined backstreet with cheap and battered bicycles chained up along the railings of its wide pavements, a clear sign we were close to a place frequented by poor and struggling scholars. Sure enough, we soon saw increasing numbers of young people in that universal student uniform, jeans and T-shirts, walking along singly or in twos and threes, books and bags in hand. Then we came across what we were looking for, an old nondescript sandstone building with a faded sign across the top of its entrance. The sign said École Normale Supérieure.

I had travelled 26,000 km, all the way from Brisbane on the other side of the world, to visit the place where Sartre and Beauvoir had met ninety years ago, but now I faced an unexpected

Street in Paris, France

The Rue Saint-Jacques (French pronunciation:[ʁysɛ̃ʒak]) is a street in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

History

Formerly lying along the cardo of Roman Lutetia, this street was a main axial road of medieval Paris, as the buildings that still front it attest. It is the historic starting point, at no. 252, the Église Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, for pilgrims leaving Paris to make their way along the Chemin de Saint-Jacques that led eventually to Santiago de Compostela (James, Jacques, Jacob, and Iago being names of the same saint in English, French, Latin, and Spanish, respectively). However, the introduction of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, constructed through this old quarter of Paris by Baron Haussmann, relegated the roughly parallel Rue Saint-Jacques to a backstreet.

The Paris base of the Dominican Order was established in 1218 under the leadership of Pierre Seilhan (or Seila) in the Chapelle Saint-Jacques, close to the Porte Saint-Jacques, on this street; this is why the Dominicans were called Jacobins in Paris. Thus the street's name is indirectly responsible for the Jacobin Club in the French Revolution getting that name (being based in a former Jacobin monastery, itself located elsewhere). Johann Heynlin and Guillaume Fichet established the first printing press in France, briefly at the Sorbonne and then on this street, in the 1470s. The second printers in Paris were Peter Kayser and Johann Stohl at the sign of the Soleil d'Or in the Rue Saint-Jacques, from 1473. The proximity of the Sorbonne led many later booksellers and printers to set up shop here also.

Notable sites

• The Sorbonne
• The Lycée Louis-le-Grand
• The Institut de géographie of Panthéon-Sorbonne University at 191 Rue Saint-Jacques
• No. 163bis: Le Port du Salut, an 18th-century inn, had a cabaret where many artistes made their debuts: Guy Béart, Barbara, Georges Moustaki, Pierre Perret, Jean Yanne, C

Random quotes from a six-day period: an American television reporter characterizes the life and death of O. J. Simpson as “really surreal”; the self-same words are used by a potential juror in the latest Donald Trump trial; the winning jockey in the Grand National calls his victory a “bit surreal, to be honest”; and in the closing paragraph of her recent book Liz Truss signs off: “The whole experience as prime minister had been quite surreal …”

It’s routinely said that such utterance of “surreal” in public discourse – signifying something odd, untoward or unexpected – has rendered it all but empty of meaning, a degraded coin to place alongside “iconic” and “existential”. But perhaps this passe-partout usage retains more of the word’s original rough charge than yet another tastefully curated show in a hygienic white-cube gallery. Surrealism has graduated from mere art-speak and become enmeshed in life. The schism is healed.

Mark Polizzotti’s Why Surrealism Matters is timed to coincide with the movement’s 100th anniversary, but are we really so sure when Surrealism began? The inaugural event is now taken to be the first Surrealist Manifesto, written by André Breton and published in October 1924. But there were anticipatory skirmishes and screwball portents aplenty. Breton and his circle acknowledged a broad church of precursor angels, including the Marquis de Sade and Dean Swift, Marx and Freud, Poe and Rimbaud. This matter of precedence can feel tricky and decidedly theological. Here are just a few contenders:

First, for a few months in 1916, in a small back room in Zurich, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings run the Cabaret Voltaire. On July 14 that year Ball publicly declaims his Dada Manifesto. Dada later relocates to Paris and lays most of the groundwork for the emergence of Surrealism.

Second, in May 1917 Guillaume Apollinaire first used the term “surrealist” in programme notes