A pilot chose a dying man over his own escape

A pilot stayed at the controls of a burning plane

A few steps from this junction of Rue Gustave Courbet, Rue Herran, and Rue de Longchamp, a plaque marks the home of Maurice Henri France de Seynes, a captain of the Normandie-Niemen squadron who died in July 1944 in a burning aircraft over Doubrovka rather than abandon his badly wounded Soviet mechanic — he stayed at the controls and brought the plane down instead of parachuting to safety alone. The building he lived in stands within the tight circle around where you are now.

Just beyond, a second plaque commemorates Alimardan Bey Toptchibashi, who served as president of the parliament of the short-lived Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan and spent part of 1920 living in an apartment on this stretch of streets — an exile's address after his republic was absorbed by the Soviet Union.

These few streets carry an unusual density of private memory for a residential quarter: names fixed to housefronts rather than to monuments. It is a neighborhood built mostly in the late nineteenth century for the Parisian bourgeoisie moving out toward the edge of the city near the Bois de Boulogne, and the plaques that survive on its walls tend to record who lived and died behind them rather than any public event that happened in the street itself.

Writers and resisters left their addresses on nearby walls

A short walk from here, near where Avenue Victor-Hugo begins its run toward the Étoile, a plaque marks the site of the hôtel where Victor Hugo died on 22 May 1885 — the building itself long gone, its site remembered on the pavement of the avenue that now carries his name.

Two streets over, other plaques catalogue the underside of the Occupation years in this arrondissement: a Colonel Touny, president of the resistance network OCM, shot by the Germans at Arras in April 1944; Jacques Arthuys, founder of the same organization, who died at the Hinzert camp; and, closer to Rue Lauriston, the house where French auxiliaries of the Gestapo — the group known as Bonny-Lafont, later called the Carlingue — tortured captured résistants between 1941 and 1944. A separate plaque nearby records the arrest, on 2 March 1942, of Georges Dudach and Charlotte Delbo, she later deported to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.

The literary residue of the quarter runs the other direction. Marcel Proust spent his final years in an apartment about 785 meters off, dying there on 18 November 1922; Henry de Montherlant lived nearby as a young man between 1901 and 1907. The Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, a short walk south, has educated the district's sons and daughters since the late nineteenth century and carries its own war memorial to former students killed in 1914–18.

Toward Trocadéro, the ground turns from residential to institutional: the Palais de Chaillot and its museums — naval history, ethnography, architecture — occupy the hill above the river, on the site of the demolished 1878 Trocadéro Palace. Passy Cemetery, modest in size, holds among others the actor and Renoir model Henriette Henriot and her daughter Jane, who died in a theatre fire in 1900 after going back for her dog.

Eocene limestone underlies every facade on this street

Underfoot, tens of millions of years before any of these streets existed, this ground was laid down as Eocene-age limestone, gypsum, and clay — the same soft, easily quarried Paris basin rock that gave the city its building stone and its catacombs. None of that geology announces itself at street level here; it simply set the terms, long before Haussmann's engineers cut Rue Gustave Courbet through what had been open ground at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, for the pale stone facades that now line every one of these blocks.