The Invention of Paris (30 page)

In 1851, the guillotine was removed for a while from the Faubourg Saint-Jacques. Executions were then performed in front of the La Roquette prison. The condemned man only had to walk from his cell to the scaffold. Maxime Du Camp asked:

What makes up this throng that Paris flings towards the Place de la Roquette during the night that precedes an execution? People of the quarter excited by the spectacle, and who are there, as they themselves put it, as neighbours, prowlers of all kinds, vagabonds, ruffians and beggars who, not knowing where to find shelter, come and spend there the hours of a night that they would otherwise no doubt have spent under a bridge or in the cage of a police station.
¹⁰¹

In April 1870, when Paris was at boiling point after the murder of Victor Noir by Pierre Bonaparte, it was here that the execution of Troppmann was carried out, as described by Turgenev, ending in a manner that might be surprising for a man who was friendly with Du Camp, Flaubert, and the Goncourts: ‘I will be content and excuse my own misplaced curiosity if my story supplies a few arguments to those who are in favour of the abolition of capital punishment, or, at least, the abolition of public executions.'
¹⁰²

In April 1899, when the men's prison of La Roquette was demolished, the guillotine returned to the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, on the corner of
Boulevard Arago and Rue de la Santé. It remained there right to the end, even if after 1939 executions were no longer public but carried out within the prison. Under the Occupation, French hostages were shot in the courtyard, but during the Algerian war, the FLN militants condemned for murder were guillotined. On 28 November 1972 the series was closed with Claude Buffet and Roger Bontemps, whom Georges Pompidou refused a presidential pardon.

Montparnasse, the third of the southern faubourgs, is a case apart. On the one hand, it is a Parisian name famous across the world, matched only by Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Près. On the other, it is a quarter with a weak identity, whether in terms of geographical limits, history – aside from the ‘crazy years' that have so often been recounted – architecture or population. Montparnasse is proof
a contrario
of the importance of walls in the definition of Paris quarters: it was built so late in the nineteenth century that Louis XIV's boulevard, today represented by Boulevard Montparnasse, was never its actual border. As for the wall of the Farmers-General (now the route of Boulevards Raspail and Edgar-Quinet), it had already been demolished. Thus the borders of Montparnasse were always vague. If they may be fixed on one side by Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and on another by Avenue Denfert-Rochereau and the Observatoire intersection, and if, in the direction of Faubourg Saint-Germain, Montparnasse scarcely goes beyond Rue du Cherche-Midi, on the outer side no one knows where it comes to an end, so that estate agents do not flinch at extending its glorious name as far as the Porte de Vanves, or even the Porte d'Orléans.

It is not entirely correct to deny Boulevard Montparnasse any border role, as in its route across the quarter it divides two arrondissements between which there is a certain difference, Montparnasse being rather more bourgeois in the 6
^th
arrondissement, and rather more plebeian in the 14
^th
. This uneven development between the two sides of the boulevard goes back to the origins of the quarter. In the 1830s, urbanization began on the side of Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Rue du Montparnasse – of which Hurtaut and Magny had already written, fifty years earlier, that ‘newly opened, it is beginning to be equipped with some very fine houses'. But these roads were still semirural in character. Balzac's Godefroid, for example, in ‘The Initiate', was ‘surprised to find such puddles of mud in so magnificent a district',
¹⁰³
at the end of Rue Notre-Dame-du-Champs on
the Observatory side. At the same time – that of his
Cromwell
and
Hernani
– Victor Hugo lived with Adèle in a small house at the other end of the road. He was only a few steps away from Boulevard Montparnasse, and among the many promenaders attracted by the taverns of the
barrières
, the open-air shops, the sideshows and the cemetery. Facing the cemetery was an acrobats' booth. This opposition of parade and burial confirmed him, Hugo said, in his idea of a theatre in which extremes met, and it was this that gave him the idea for the third act of
Marion Delorme
, in which the Marquis de Nangis's mourning is contrasted with the grimaces of Le Gracieux. Sainte-Beuve was a neighbour of the Hugos, which led to complications that are well known. Later on, established artists, those exhibited at the Salon, came to live in the ‘6
^th
arrondissement part' of Montparnasse. Gérôme had his studio on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, known as the Tea Chest because its entrance was decorated with two Chinese figures. Opposite, at no. 70
bis
, there was the house of Bouguereau, the idol of Douanier Rousseau.
¹⁰⁴
Henner, who had his museum close by on Rue Jean-Berrandi; Baudry, who decorated the foyer of the Garnier opera; Jules Thomas, sculptor of the gilded bust of Charles Garnier that can be seen on Rue Auber by the monument; Jean-Paul Laurens; Ramey; Moreau-Vauthier – all these famous artists lived on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Carolus-Duran was on Rue Jules-Chaplain, Rochegrosse on Rue de l'Ouest (now d'Assas), and Falguière on Rue Vavin. Thus Montparnasse, famous for having been the cradle of modern art, was earlier on the favoured quarter of academic painters, along with Rue Monceau. How strange it is to think that, in these same years, Gauguin lived – between his voyages – with ‘Anna the Javanese' on the other side of the boulevard, on Rue Doulart, Rue Delambre that was a haunt of ragpickers and prostitutes, and Rue Vercingétorix.

In the romantic period these streets did not yet exist. Beyond the cemetery was no longer Paris. There were fields and windmills, some of which have left their names to streets in this quarter, such as Rue du Moulin-de-la-Vierge and Rue du Moulin-du-Beurre (now du Texel), which housed one of the most famous
guinguettes
of the age, that of Mother Saguet. For twenty sous you got two boiled eggs, a sauté chicken, cheese, and as much white wine as you liked. Over the years there, you could have met Scribe, Béranger, Devéria, Dumas, Hugo, Baudelaire or Murger, who used the setting for one of his
Scènes de la vie de bohème
. After 1840, the countryside slowly began to retreat with the building of the railway, which you took from the Chartres station.
But this did not prevent the
guinguettes
from spreading. Around the Barrière du Maine, you had the choice of the Californie, ‘the great popular eatery' as Delvau describes it, or the restaurant of the Cuisiniers Associés, operated as a cooperative, and where the socialists held their banquets in 1848. Or you could opt for one of the tramps' dens on the Impasse d'Odessa, which did not yet reach through to Boulevard Montparnasse. Rue Campagne-Première was the domain of the horse, around the stables of the Société Générale de Voitures à Paris. Farriers, carriage makers and saddlers frequented the coachmen's restaurants, where ‘you ate large portions quite decently cooked, with a certain overdose of veal Marengo. Algerian wine jostled with that of Narbonne; the cheeses did not lack character'.
¹⁰⁵

But the main road of the
guinguettes
was Rue de la Gaîté. Wine cost less outside the
octroi
wall – the Barrière Montparnasse was on Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. This
barrière
played the same role for the south of Paris as Rue de Paris (now de Belleville) did for the east, or Rue de la Chapelle for the north. This was the site of the Îles-Marquises – which still exists – close to a police station run by the symbolist novelist Ernest Raynaud, a friend of Moréas; the Belle-Polonaise, where you could eat in the garden against the cemetery wall; the tavern of Les Vrais-Amis; the Mille-Colonnes, popular with the
bohème
of the Latin Quarter under the Second Empire, headed by Courbet and Vallès. It was a magnificent street. In Huysmans's words:

I soon reached Rue de la Gaîté. The strains of quadrilles escaped from open windows; large posters, outside the doors of a café-concert, announced the opening of Mme Adèle, a popular singer, and the return of M. Adolphe, an eccentric comedian; further along, under the sign of a wine merchant, there were piles of snails, their blond flesh sprinkled with parsley; and here and there, pastry cooks displayed great quantities of cakes in their windows, some dome shaped, others flat and topped with a pink and trembling jelly, some with brown stripes, others hollowed out and showing succulent flesh of a sulphurous yellow. This street well justified its joyful name.
¹⁰⁶

But nighttime was not completely safe in this popular and joyous Montparnasse:

There was still waste ground, even right on the boulevard . . . badly enclosed by shaky fences which fell down under the weight of the posters
stuck to their boards, from the contradictory announcements of the radical distiller Jacques and General Boulanger, to the first images devoted to the novel triumph of the bicycle. It was deplorable but a well-known fact that when night fell and children were in bed, this wasteland was a place for the plots of evil ruffians . . . Nighttime attacks were not a daily occurrence at the heart of Montparnasse, but they were common enough on its borders, in the outer reaches of the station and especially under the railway bridge. Murders conveniently took place along the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, under the cemetery walls. Woe to those going out at night!
¹⁰⁷

As late as 1911, the second volume of J.-H. Rosny the elder's trilogy
Les Rafales
, whose action takes place in Montparnasse, was titled
Dans les rues, roman de moeurs apaches et bourgeoises
. Maurice and Jacques, the two ‘apache' brothers, are pursued by policemen on bicycles. They flee through Rue Gassendi and Passage Tenaille, and reach Avenue du Maine where they separate:

The cyclists sped like lightning towards the
mairie
: on the other side, the sergeants barred the road in the direction of the Gaîté . . . ‘I'm done for,' the boy thought. His best chance of escape seemed to be through the Passage de la Tour-de-Vanves [now Rue Olivier-Noyer] . . . He reached Rue Didot and cut diagonally across into Rue de l'Eure . . . On Rue Maindron, the narrow Passage des Thermopyles was tempting, and he ran into it as fast as he could . . . His urgency prevented him from taking a decision: the little steel and rubber machines were on his heels at top speed, so that he found himself in Rue des Plantes without having made any firm decision.
¹⁰⁸

The Montparnasse balls in the nineteenth century also offered material for tales. The oldest and most famous was the Grande-Chaumière, founded in 1788 by one of those Englishmen who played such an important role in the spread of ‘country dancing' in Paris, where it was naturalized as
danse champêtre
. This was a very large garden on the corner of Boulevard Montparnasse and Boulevard d'Enfer (now Boulevard Raspail), where the block of houses now stands that is isolated by the little Rue Léopold-Robert. It was immensely fashionable in the 1830s, and gave the whole life
of this quarter its rhythm. When Godefroid asked whether the house on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was inhabited by quiet people, the porter ‘made a graceful gesture and said: “Monsieur has done well for himself in coming here; for except on the days of Chaumière, the boulevard is as deserted as the Pontine marshes.” '

The majority of customers at the Grande-Chaumière were students from the Latin Quarter. ‘They heroically quaffed a horrible spirit disguised under the fallacious name of old cognac. This general system of refreshment beloved by the Chaumière led to a rowdiness, craziness, and disorder that it is hard indeed to imagine.'
¹⁰⁹
The quadrille was the popular dance, often degenerating into the forbidden dances of the
chahut
and the
cancan
, at which Lola Montès excelled. The 1831 edition of the
Manuel des sergents de ville
noted: ‘Police constables charged with supervision of dance halls must ensure that no indecent dance such as the
chahut
or
cancan
is performed.'
¹¹⁰
The vigilance of the police was not limited to proper morals. They also had to keep their eye on a crowd of students who were always ready to shout seditious slogans – ‘Down with Louis-Philippe!' or ‘Vive la République!' Enjolras and his lieutenants would certainly have visited the Chaumière from time to time; it remained closed for a year after the insurrection of June 1831. There were rivals to the Chaumière quite close at hand: a few steps away was the Jardin des Montagnes Suisses; on the opposite corner of the same crossroads the Arc-en-Ciel dance hall, which specialized in waltzes; the Ermitage, favoured by legal clerks; and the Élysée-Montparnasse, frequented by
barrière
prowlers.

The preeminence of the Chaumière lasted until 1847, when a certain Bullier, the proprietor of the Prado – the only large dance hall on the Île de la Cité – bought an old garden on Avenue de l'Observatoire and established there a dance hall that he christened La Closerie des Lilas.
¹¹¹
With its brilliant gas lighting, this was admired for ‘an Oriental decoration, and gaudy murals that a joker called “Alhambra style”'.
¹¹²
The success of the establishment that would become famous under the name of the Bal
Bullier lasted until the outbreak of the First World War, on the eve of which Sonia Delaunay came to dance there in her
robe simultanée
, along with Mayakovsky in his famous cadmium-yellow shirt.