The Invention of Paris (40 page)

The steam funicular, ‘which made a stately descent from the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church to the Place de la République, climbed slowly up again, and, creaking and grating, took you along Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple and Rue de Belleville for ten centimes', has been replaced by the no. 11 Métro line, a good deal less picturesque.
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But alongside Chinese restaurants and grocers, the bottom of Rue de Belleville keeps some vestiges of its old glory, like the Café des Folies-Belleville that evokes the music hall where Mayol, Dranem, Damia, Georgius, Fréhel and Maurice Chevalier
performed. The Théâtre de Belleville was a few metres up. To quote Lucien Daudet:

I went several times to this theatre, together with Eugène Carrière, Geffroy and Rodin. We took four places in the circle, after a good dinner at a rotisserie in the same street, where you could see your chicken being grilled and buy bread on the side, and we enjoyed the physiognomies, heads and faces gathered there, leaning forward and drinking them in with our eyes, a spectacle very much in the style of Daumier.
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The theatre was later transformed into a cinema, one of the dozen you could count in the interwar years between the Boulevard and the Belleville church, specializing in horror films. The Floréal, for its part, showed gangster films with Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, the Paradis was for musical comedies, westerns at the Alhambra and the Cocorico, and Soviet and Yiddish films at the Bellevue.
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The omnipresent Chinese are only the latest in a long series of immigrants who arrived in Belleville in successive waves, starting with the Russian and Polish Jews who fled from the pogroms of the early years of the century to establish at the foot of the hill their tradition of textile and clothing work learned in the factories of Lodz, Minsk or Bialystok. In the 1920s, Belleville had a CGT hatters' branch whose banner carried its name in Yiddish. There were leather workers and furriers, also seen as Jewish trades. Yiddish was spoken in the synagogue on Rue Julien-Lacroix, and at the Lumière de Belleville restaurant the menu offered
gefiltefish
and
pickelfleish
just as in Warsaw. Later came the Armenians fleeing Turkey in 1918. Their community was grouped around Rue Jouye-Rouve and Rue Bisson, and their speciality was shoemaking. Then came Greeks expelled from Asia Minor, German Jews in 1933 and Spanish Republicans in 1939. The Jewish concentration remained so strong that the French police had no trouble in carrying out a nice raid here in July 1942: the number of those taken from Belleville via Drancy to Auschwitz is estimated at eight thousand.

After the war it was the turn of the Algerians, needed to rebuild the
country. Along with La Chapelle, Belleville was one of the main strongholds of the FLN during the Algerian war, which did not prevent the
pieds noirs
, and Tunisian Jews in particular, from establishing themselves here on a massive scale in the 1960s. On the boulevard, between Rue de Belleville and Rue de Ménilmontant, there is something of a boundary line at Rue Bisson and Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi. On the Belleville side, spilling into Rue Lemon, Rue Ramponeau and Rue de Pali-Kao are the kosher restaurants, patisseries and grocers run by Jews. On the Ménilmontant side you have travel agents specializing in the Maghreb, Islamic bookshops, Kabyl cafés – including the marvellous Soleil, close to the Métro. This frontier, visible from the shop signs, does not prevent the population of the quarter from mingling peacefully on the boulevard, old Jewish ladies drinking tea on the patisserie terraces, young Black mothers in African robes, a baby on their back, walking up from the boulevard to do their shopping in the market, orthodox Jewish men with black hats as worn in Vilnius, groups of retired workers basking in the sun, conversing in Arabic or Kabyl, whom you imagine to be full of tolerance and humanity.

The place where the boulevard stops being Belleville and becomes Ménilmontant does not have a name. The elegant semicircular line of the apartment blocks on the side facing the city, Ménilmontant station under the catalpas of its little square, the emptiness of the boulevard's central island, form an ensemble that is much quieter than the Belleville
barrière
. Rising in a gigantic and absolutely straight line, Rue de Ménilmontant offers a view to the hilltop, and Rue Oberkampf plunges down to the centre of Paris:

Giacometti and I – and some Parisians too, I'm sure – know that there exists in Paris, where she has her dwelling, a person of great elegance, fine, haughty, vertical, singular and grey – a very tender grey – known as Rue Oberkampf, who cheekily changes her name and is called higher up Rue de Ménilmontant. Beautiful as a needle, she rises up to the sky. If you decide to explore her by car, starting from Boulevard Voltaire, she opens up as you climb, but in a singular manner: instead of retreating, the houses converge, offering very simple frontages and gables, quite commonplace but which, truly transfigured by the personality of this street, take on the quality of a kind of goodness, familiar and distant.
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If Belleville has certain aspects of a larger town – around the church, in particular, where drapers, cake shops, cheesemongers and bookshops are
grouped like in the provinces – Ménilmontant has retained more of a country feel. Rue de la Chine, between the Tenon hospital and the
mairie
of the 20
^th
arrondissement, certainly lacks the ‘joyous aspect of a country road' that Huysmans found there. The times have certainly changed a lot since:

In this huge
quartier
where meagre wages doom women and children to eternal privations, Rue de la Chine and those streets which join and cross it, such as Rue des Partants and the amazing Rue Orfila, so fantastic with its windings and its sudden turns, with its badly squared-off enclosures of trees, its abandoned summerhouses, its deserted gardens returning to a state of nature and abounding in untamed shrubs and wild grasses, give off a unique note of peace and calm.
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But you still find in Ménilmontant waste ground where ‘wild bushes and crazy weeds' sprout, cobbled passages bordered with little gardens, streets whose names evoke the northern streams that supplied Paris with water for hundreds of years – Rues des Cascades, des Rigoles, de la Mare, de la Duée, de la Cour-des-Noues, old French words that all mean spring or stream. You pass along stone walls covered with moss, and views of the old conduits – the finest of which, on Rue des Cascades at the top of Rue de Savies, dates from the reign of Henri IV. Near the Passage des Saint-Simoniens, Rue Taclet, the Villa Georgina and the Villa de l'Ermitage have not changed much since Père Enfantin attempted to practise in this quarter, away from the world, the thought of the dead master.

Between Ménilmontant and Charonne, Père-Lachaise is an unspoiled beauty, protected against commerce and fashion – in cemeteries the spirit of place always prevails over the spirit of time. The administrative boundary between the old villages of Belleville and Charonne used to pass further to the west (Rue des Partants, Rue Villiers-de-l'Isle-Adam), but today it is Père-Lachaise, belonging neither to the one nor to the other, that marks their separation. In the eighteenth century, Charonne, with its south-facing hillside, was entirely planted with vineyards and had all kinds of
guinguettes
– a word that, according to Jaillot, ‘apparently derives from the fact that in these taverns the only wine sold is a little green one known
as Guinguet, grown in the surroundings of Paris'.
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Several streets in the Charonne quarter recall its agricultural past: Rues des Haies, du Clos, des Grands-Champs, de la Plaine; Rues des Maraîchers, des Vignoles, des Orteaux – the latter mysteriously deriving from the Latin
hortus
. It is perhaps this rural background and the consequent absence of remarkable buildings or historic events that have left Charonne with a deficient identity – despite having given its name to a major street, a boulevard, and a Métro station. Few people say that they live in Charonne; these are to be found almost entirely at the centre, on the site of the former château and around the church, in the little hamlet that you could find ‘coming down from Belleville via the Ratrait, two kilometres further on, a village of houses interspersed with gardens, dominated in the foreground by a rustic bell tower'.
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It is rather better to reach Charonne from above, for example through Rue Stendhal (curiously described as a ‘
littérateur
' on the blue and white plaque). This is a street that Queneau found sad: ‘Among the saddest streets of Paris/one could mention Rue Villiers-de-L'Is/le-Adam, Rue Baudelaire (Charles)/and Rue Henri-Beyle known as Stendhal/these really haven't been spoiled/you even start thinking/they have rather been punished/by naming such sad streets after them.'
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And yet the acute angle made by Rue Stendhal when it forks off from Rue des Pyrénées is occupied by a dispensary from the 1910s devoted to ‘diseases of the chest', and, on the gable wall that drops down to it you can still read, above an almost obliterated advertisement for Saint-Raphaël, a slogan for ‘
Cadorcin, shampoing à l'huile
', these few metres being almost a condensation of the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, from the BCG vaccination and the anti-TB stamp through to André Kertész and the Poste Parisien (a private radio station belonging to the newspaper
Le Petit Parisien
). Further along, the tall chestnut trees of the cemetery appear on the hillside, together with the pointed bell tower of the church of Saint-Germain-de-Charonne. Crossing the grass that covers the Charonne reservoirs, you reach an immense garage bordering on Rue Lucien-Leuwen. Although this is a cul-de-sac, it is the only street in Paris to bear the name of the hero of a novel. (Likewise
unfinished; there is also, not far from here, the Rue Monte-Cristo, but this was an island before becoming a character.) It is high time that all those shameful names of the Second Empire were replaced by characters from novels: Avenue Mac-Mahon – capitulationist general, well-known idiot, and seditious president – could become Avenue Manon-Lescaut (perhaps an exception could be made here, calling this Avenue Anna-Karina to honour the historic New Wave cinema); Avenue Bugeaud could become Avenue du Prince-Mishkin; Boulevard de Magenta, Boulevard Eugène-Rastignac; Avenue de Malakoff, Avenue Charles Swann; the Pont de l'Alma, Pont Jean-Valjean; and Rue de Turbigo, Rue Moll-Flanders. This would mean a lot of work, as I have counted thirty-one Paris streets named after the glorious campaigns of Napoleon III in Italy, the Crimea and Mexico. Not counting those that remind us of great deeds in the colonies, and their heroes both imperial and republican.

Opposite Rue Lucien-Leuwen, in Rue du Parc-de-Charonne, a small gate gives access to the cemetery. The standing statue of a man in a threecornered hat, holding his cane in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other, has recently been taken away – for restoration, I hope. This could be a secretary of Robespierre's, with a new interest in horticulture. The tomb of Robert Brasillach (6 February 1945) has not been removed, but joined in 1998 by his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche. At the foot of the hill the very old Charonne church, on its raised platform, overlooks Rue de Bagnolet and the vista of Rue Saint-Blaise, the former village high street. (‘Saint Blaise, one of the great miracle workers of the East, bishop of Sebaste in Armenia according to some, of Caesarea in Cappadocia according to others, died 316, was particularly invoked to deal with vipers and sore throats.'
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)

On the last foothills of Charonne, between Rue de Bagnolet – from where you glimpse the tops of the trees in Père-Lachaise, across the walls at the end of ravishing cul-de-sacs – and the very proletarian Rue d'Avron that marks your arrival on the plain, more recent streets cut across village streets that are, along with the periphery of La Chapelle, what is most ‘away from it all' in Paris: Rue des Maraîchers that parallels the tracks of the Ceinture railway, with its wild wood, Rue Fernand-Gambon from where you look over the ruins of a Magritte-type station covered in ivy, the warehouses of Rue du Volga (sic) and Rue des Grands-Champs, and my favourite, Rue des Vignoles. There are little passages here between all the houses – the Impasses des Souhaits, de la Confiance, des Crins, de Bergame, even Impasse Satan opposite Passage Dieu, and a nameless blind
alley with the black-and-red flag of the anarchist Confédération Nationale du Travail. These are not two metres wide, and end up at fences, workshops, broken doors. It is here – and here alone in Paris – that you can still see what Huysmans described so tenderly about Rue de la Chine:

Everything here is crooked: there are no walls, no bricks, no stones, but on each side, lining an unpaved road furrowed down the middle by a ditch, stretches a picket fence from old boat timbers, marbled with green moss and veneered with golden-brown tar, which leans, dragging down a whole cluster of ivy, and almost taking with it a gate, clearly bought in a lot from some demolition yard, embellished with mouldings whose delicate grey still shows through under a brown layer of tan deposited by the successive touch of dirty hands.
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Across the Cours de Vincennes, the world changes as you enter the section of the 12
^th
arrondissement annexed at the expense of the commune of Saint-Mandé. In this district, the wall of the Farmers-General forms a salient – Boulevard de Picpus, Boulevard de Reuilly, Place Félix-Éboué (Métro Daumesnil) – curious on the map but whose reason is clear enough on the ground: the wall followed the edge of a plateau that overlooks the Seine and the Bois de Vincennes. (La Bédollière: ‘The Bel-Air is the name of an avenue that connects the Place du Trône with the Avenue de Saint-Mandé. The name is justified by the pureness of the air that you breathe on this plateau, on which boarding-schools, clinics and convents proliferate.') Rue Claude-Decaen goes sharply uphill from Daumesnil towards the Bois, and Rue Taine down towards Bercy and the river.
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At the bottom, in the valley, Rue de Charenton, parallel to the tracks from the Gare de Lyon, ends its long trajectory from the Bastille. In its final stretch, on the corner of the ‘boulevard of the marshals' which has here the name of Poniatowski, this bridges the rusty tracks of the Ceinture railway. From this spot, opposite the gate of the little Bercy cemetery that is the only old enclave in this remote corner, you have – over the landscape of the southeastern suburbs, an endless sea of concrete – the ‘terrible view of the plains that lie, harassed, at the feet of the city', as Huysmans put it.