Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at Père Lachaise

Forty years at 27 rue de Fleurus

Stein arrived in Paris in 1903 and set up with her brother Leo at 27 rue de Fleurus, near the Luxembourg gardens. What happened in that apartment over the next three decades is a large part of why modernism has a Paris address at all: Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris on the walls, and on Saturday evenings a room full of people looking at them.

Alice B. Toklas arrived from San Francisco in 1907, met Stein on her first day in the city, and stayed for thirty-nine years. She typed the manuscripts, ran the household, cooked, and — in the book that made Stein commercially famous, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written by Stein in Toklas's voice — was given a literary identity by someone else.

The two of them spent the German occupation in a village in the Bugey, in the Rhône-Alpes, protected by a Vichy official who was an old friend, which is a complication in Stein's biography that anyone who admires her has to sit with rather than explain away.

The stone

Stein died of stomach cancer on 27 July 1946. The headstone was designed by Francis Rose, an English painter whom Stein had championed at considerable cost to her reputation as a judge of art, and it is deliberately plain — a low block of granite, lettering incised, nothing else.

It also contains mistakes. Her birthplace is cut as "Allfghany" rather than Allegheny, and the date of death is reported to be a couple of days out. Nobody has ever corrected either, and the errors have become part of what people come to see. There is a Stein joke buried in that, and it is hers: in the Autobiography she has Toklas observe that had she been born in California as intended, she would never have had the pleasure of watching French officials try to spell Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

Why Toklas is on the back

Toklas outlived Stein by twenty-one years, most of them in difficulty. Stein's relatives took the paintings — the collection that had been their shared life — on the grounds that Toklas had no legal claim to them, which under French law at the time she did not. She was, by the end, living on the charity of friends.

She died in March 1967 and was buried in the same grave. Her name, her dates and her details are carved on the reverse of the stone, at her own request, so that the face of the monument would remain Stein's alone.

Stand behind the headstone and read it. Two women who could not be married, in a country and a century that offered them no way of recording forty years as anything at all, found the only formal arrangement available to them: one stone, two faces, and a decision about which of them the world got to look at.

Finding it

Division 94 is in the upper eastern quarter. From the Porte Gambetta, walk in and bear right; the division is signed, and the grave sits close to a path rather than deep in a block, which is unusual up here and makes it findable without much hunting. Visitors leave small stones along the top edge, in the Jewish custom — Stein was born to a Jewish family — which is the easiest way to recognise it from a distance.

Oscar Wilde is five divisions away in 89 and Marcel Proust nine divisions off in 85, so the three of them make a natural half-hour of walking. The full index of graves has the division numbers for everyone else up here.