
12, rue de l’Odeon was the second location of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company (not to be confused with the other Shakespeare & Company, which still exists and is near Notre Dame).
This is where many expatriate English-language authors from the “Lost Generation” (like Joyce, Fitzgerald & Hemingway) hung out.
I wonder if they knew that just next door, at 10, rue de l’Odeon, is where Thomas Paine lived.