The Invention of Paris (37 page)

This battle is an odd story, and singularly forgotten, apart from the monument to Moncey in the middle of the Place de Clichy, and the tiny Impasse de la Défense. It is one in a whole series that began in 1792 and ended in the years 1940–44 – its intermediate steps being precisely 1814, as well as 1871 – consisting of violent conflicts between a ‘ruling elite' ready to capitulate and compromise with the enemy, and that section of the Paris people who are eternally rebellious.

Of all the villages annexed in 1860, Montmartre is the one that has retained most autonomy, despite being always very closely bound up with Parisian life. It is the only one to have a street bearing its name at the very heart of the city (indeed one of the oldest and most important), running right to the Halles and the apse of Saint-Eustache. The abbesses of Montmartre owned immense estates stretching down to the walls of Paris. Several of them gave their names to streets on the slopes of the 9
^th
arrondissement: Louise-Émilie de la Tour d'Auvergne, Marie de Bellefond, Catherine de La Rochefoucault, Marguerite de Rochechouart – and one of the strangest couplings in the names of the Métro stations is that between this great name of French nobility and the professional revolutionary Armand Barbès.
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Montmartre is also the Paris quarter whose name has the largest number of different connotations. There is the Montmartre of village folklore – the ‘
Commune libre
', Poulbot, the Fête des Vendanges – which is included in, though does completely coincide with, tourist Montmartre, whose main attractions are the Sacré-Coeur and the Place du Tertre. There is the Montmartre of its heyday, whose story, told a thousand times, has its backdrops (the Moulin de la Galette, the Lapin-Agile, the Bateau-Lavoir), its heroes (Bruant, Apollinaire, Picasso), its chroniclers (Carco, Dorgelès, Mac Orlan, Salmon) and its painters (from Degas, Van Gogh and Lautrec to poor Utrillo). There is also Red Montmartre, its emblematic figure being Louise Michel, the schoolteacher from Rue Houdon, the inspiration behind the vigilance committee at 41 Chaussée de Clignancourt – I shall speak of her later on. And there is again, to take up the title of Louis Chevalier's book, the Montmartre of pleasure and crime. On 21 July 1938,
a few weeks before Munich,
Le Détective
carried the headline: ‘From the Drama of the Rat-Mort to the Cannes Vendetta', announcing a report on the inexpiable hatred between the Foata and Stéfani clans. A world that was still very much alive in the 1950s – the Corsicans of Pigalle, Pierrot le Fou (the real one), the ‘front-wheel drive gang' – evoked by one of the finest films on the underside of Paris, Jean-Pierre Melville's
Bob le Flambeur
.

In certain parts, these different meanings have built up in successive layers, but today they have melted into an indistinct general memory, though this has kept a certain sparkle despite the decline. On the semicircle of Place Pigalle, the fountain occupies the site of the square building constructed by Ledoux for the Montmartre
barrière
. The Café des Omnibus and the no. 67 bus stand recall the famous line from Pigalle to the Halle aux Vins. ‘You find here', wrote Delvau in the 1860s, ‘two temples to beer, the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, a meeting place for daubers and writers from the Breda quarter, and the Café de la Place Pigalle, a neighbour and competitor on this square widened by the demolition of the wall.' On Sunday mornings a fair for artists' models was held by the fountain: ‘Italian girls musing around the basin waited, in sequined dresses and with tambourine in hand, for a painter keen on the past to invite them to pose.'
⁴⁴
The Impressionists at the Nouvelle-Athènes – after the Guerbois – that was a whole chapter in the history of art and the legend of the quarter. George Moore, a regular there, explained to the English public Degas's painting
L'Absinthe
, which shows Deboutin seated in the Nouvelle-Athènes café:

Look at the head of the old bohemian – the engraver Deboutin – a man whom I have known all my life, and yet he never really existed for me until I saw this picture . . . The woman that sits beside the artist was at the Élysée Montmartre until two in the morning, then she went to the Rat-Mort and had a
soupe aux choux
. . . she did not get up till half-past eleven; then she tied a few soiled petticoats round her . . . and came down to the café to have an absinthe before breakfast.
⁴⁵

In this fin-de-siècle period, Pigalle was still peaceful at night. ‘The Rat-Mort saw anarchists and authoritarians live side by side, artists and stockbrokers, writers and businessmen. But once the coffee was drunk, and the last glass of
beer swallowed, Good Night!, and everyone went their own way, making way for “ladies” who scorned the opinion of the few males still present.'
⁴⁶
It was between the wars that things took a turn for the worse, when the ‘
milieu
' laid its hands on the place. Edith Piaf explained what life was like in Pigalle around 1930, when she was eighteen years old:

I was obliged to take note, while I was singing in the streets, of the dance halls where there were very well-dressed women, with expensive necklaces and rings. In the evenings I reported what I had seen to Albert. On Saturday nights and Sundays, in his best suit, he went to the dance halls I had indicated. As he was very good-looking and self-assured, he always managed to seduce one of the women dancing. He took them all into Impasse Lemercier, a dark and deserted alley, and seized their jewellery and their money. I waited in the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes. He bought me champagne for the rest of the night.
⁴⁷

It is memories such as these that give Pigalle and its surroundings today – Avenue Frochot, Impasse Guelma – the sadness and worn-out charm of a place ‘aged and grown old in the glories and tribulations of life', as Baudelaire wrote in ‘The Salon of 1859'.

Between Boulevard de Clichy and Boulevard de Rochechouart to the south, and Rues Caulaincourt and Custine to the north, the Montmartre hill inextricably mingles the best and worst – which, one has to say, are better and worse than elsewhere. ‘Inextricably': the unusual contours, the cliffs, ravines, gorges and open quarries – one of which became the Montmartre cemetery – break up the hill into several separate geographical units, divided, joined and crossed by steps and hairpin bends. Fear of the worst, of the crowds and the tourist coaches, keeps many Parisians away from Montmartre. They do not know what they are missing, above all the joy of the hilltop. In the days of the Montmartre abbesses, there were only two ways of reaching the peak through the vineyards and windmills: from the Paris side was the Vieux-Chemin, now the route of Rue Ravignan, and from Saint-Denis the Chemin de la Procession, which has become Rue du Mont-Cenis. There is more choice today: the curves of Rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre; Rue André-Antoine, which formerly bore the magnificent name Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts – after an adjacent dance hall – and leads from Place Pigalle to Rue des Abbesses past the hôtel of Maria Malibran;
the steps of Rue Girardon, which, continuing through the workshops and gardens of Rue d'Orchampt, lead from the Place Constantin-Pecquer to the Bateau-Lavoir. Once at the top, when you find yourself on a fine winter morning in the square that holds the very essence of Montmartre, by Rue Cortot, Rue des Saules, Rue de l'Abreuvoir and the Maison Rose, the Allée des Brouillards dear to Nerval,
⁴⁸
the vineyards, the Saint-Vincent cemetery, the Lapin-Agile, the magic curve of Avenue Junot – how can you not be struck by such splendour? And to end this talk of Montmartre, why ignore its pleasure, why not admit that the whole of literature, cinema and photography will never restore the happiness of a walk starting at the foot of Rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre and ending at Stendhal's tomb in the Montmartre cemetery?

Below Rue Caulaincourt and Rue Custine, the Butte Montmartre falls away sharply down to Rue Marcadet, followed by a more gentle slope to the edge of Paris, on Boulevard Ney. Certain points on this descent are extreme outposts of Montmartre: the Lamarck-Caulaincourt station, which you leave as if hurled into space, and the Place Jules-Joffrin, the only square in Paris where the
mairie
and the church stand face to face.
⁴⁹
But the essential feature of this northern part of the 18
^th
arrondissement is Clignancourt, an old quarter of artisans and small workshops, ‘inhabited in 1860 by distillers, typefounders, mechanical sawyers, cleaners of bedding . . . It is in Clignancourt that Ignace Pleyel store wood and do their sawing, a company whose pianos rival those of Érard.'
⁵⁰
Around the same time, on a fine spring afternoon, Germinie Lacerteux and her lover

went up the Chausée Clignancourt and, with the stream of Parisians from the suburbs all in a hurry to drink in some fresh air, they walked towards the open stretch of sky which awaited them at the top of the rise, at the end of the long row of houses . . . At Château Rouge they
came upon the first tree, the first leaves . . . In the distance stretched the country, sparkling and vague, lost in the golden haze of seven o'clock. . . They walked downhill, followed the blackened pavement of the long walls and lines of houses broken by the gaps of gardens . . . The descent came to an end, the paved road broke off . . . And then Paris came to an end and there began one of those dry landscapes which big towns create around them, that first zone of suburbs
intra muros
, where Nature is parched, the soil used up, the countryside sown with oyster-shells . . . Soon there rose before them the last street-lamp, hanging from a green post . . . Behind Montmartre they arrived at those big trenches, squared excavations, with their criss-cross of small, worn, grey paths. At the end of that, you turned to cross the railway-bridge, past that evil encampment of vagrants, the rough-walkers' quarter of lower Clignancourt. They would pass quickly along by those houses built out of materials stolen from demolitions, reeking of the horrors they concealed: these hovels, half-shack, half-burrow, vaguely alarmed Germinie; she could feel all the crimes of Night crouching there.
⁵¹

The quarter grows increasingly noisy, and its population increasingly colourful, as you approach Boulevard Ney. The Porte de Clignancourt is animated by a more intense life than any of the other gates of Paris, the majority of these now being little more than vast dislocated roundabouts between the city and the suburbs, between the ‘boulevards of the marshals' and the no-man's-land beyond the Périphérique, unreachable on foot. At Clignancourt, on the other hand, thanks to the neighbouring flea market, this intermediate zone is chaotic and bustling, in the smoke of kebabs and grilled maize, and the hellish noise of the Périphérique drowning the chants of the three-card tricksters. Strange market stalls are ranged around dented cars, amid sellers of tiger balm, pralines, luminous yo-yos and secondhand jackets. Between Paris and Saint-Ouen is a piece of the Third World, an oasis of disorder at the edge of a city that tolerates this less and less.

For certain people, the Goutte d'Or – from the name of a white wine much appreciated by Henri IV – is a part of Montmartre. It is a fact that
it continues along the hill eastward without interruption, exception made for the recent and artificial Boulevard Barbès. But the physical geography is not sufficient reason to combine two quarters whose differences are so apparent. The Montmartre streets run along the contours, and had to be linked by the famous steps, ‘hard on the poor', as the song goes.
⁵²
In the Goutte d'Or, the streets make a St Andrew's cross, giving them a gentler slope and making for a large variety of levels and cuts, sharp angles with buildings which have one entrance on an upper level and one on a lower, with long and narrow courtyards.

The two quarters also each have a quite different imaginary. Until the 1950s, the Goutte d'Or was dark and disturbing, a Paris equivalent of the Whitechapel of Jack the Ripper. As Carco puts it: ‘It was not the girls I particularly liked, but above all the dark streets, the bars, the cold, the fine rain on the roofs, the chance encounters, and, in the bedrooms, a sense of shattering abandon that gripped my heart . . . In the distance, beyond the Goutte d'Or, the gloomy land of the east like a storm cloud ready to burst and spill over us.'
⁵³
Since then, the scenery has changed from
L'Assommoir
to
A Thousand and One Nights
. The Goutte d'Or has become a gateway to the East, an Arab quarter with ‘piles of sequined fabrics, muslins, silks, lamés. And also the gleaming jewellery of countless gold objects, complicated necklaces and belts overloaded with pearls, hands of Fatima, etc. . . . And still more than the pastry shops and their smells, still more than the shops selling records with Eastern rhythms, these shops selling jewellery and travel goods strike me as expressing in new forms, with new desires and dreams, what I would call in an old word the spirit of the place.'
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The Goutte d'Or was ravaged by a clumsy renovation in the late 1980s; the sharp edges of the corner buildings were smoothed, the
lavoir
on Rue des Islettes, which Zola had used as a model for that of Gervaise (‘an immense shed with a flat roof, exposed beams, standing on cast-iron pillars and closed by large clear windows'), has been demolished, and the contours that were so specific to the place have been levelled to build playing fields that are always deserted. The atmosphere of the old quarter can still be found, however, around the Saint-Bernard church, Rue Léon and its Théâtre du Lavoir, and Rue Cavé, still bordered by little houses, between which there even remains some open ground.