Stachura spent the first eleven years of his life in France. The family lived in a large tenement house shared by a multilingual mix of emigrants; Stachura would later describe it in his first novel as "this great Tenement of Babel, where apart from the Poles, who called the tune, there was a mass of Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Italians, Arabs, and other representatives of nations." Stachura attended a French school and, once a week, the Polish school, a teacher having been provided by the consulate. His brother Ryszard, eight years his senior, says that young Edward was courteous, caring, and likeable, but unusually stubborn: in school he had a habit of correcting his teachers if their ideas were at odds with those he got from other sources.