The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (12 page)

“Charlemagne carried a king’s head?” I asked.

“Yes, but I don’t know if Charlemagne or someone else cut it off,” she said.

François Perrocheau, the Pain Quotidien Paris district manager, began to laugh. “Wasn’t the king Richard the Lion-Hearted?” he asked.

“Good try, but wrong!” I said.

Other people told me the name referred to victims in French history—most often the 1789 French Revolution, or the 1871 Paris Commune, the violent Socialist movement that briefly ruled Paris.

“Rebels marched down the rue des Martyrs from Montmartre during the Commune, and they were martyred, no?” said Juan Alarson, whom I met at a neighborhood fair at the place Saint-Georges.

His friend Marie-José Ballesteros contradicted him: “No, no, it had something to do with the Revolution. I’m sure of it, the Revolution.”

Claudine Dumoulin, who was with them, said both were wrong. “It was the road that led to the battle of Montmartre in the Middle Ages,” she said, inventing a battle that may never have happened.

Enzo Guénard, a teenager whose father is the owner and chef of the bistro Miroir at the top of the street, said he was sure it related to the suffering of the Allies at the hands of the Nazis. “It dates from 1939 to 1945,” he said, sounding like a history professor. “The Germans tortured the Allies to learn about their secret projects.”

I broke the news to all of them that the martyrs had nothing to do with wars in French history.

Sébastien Gaudard, the chef-owner of Pâtisserie des Martyrs—the haute couture pastry shop he opened in 2011—came close to the truth. He said the name referred to his namesake, Saint Sébastien.

“He was a martyr!” he said.

Indeed, Saint Sébastien was a third-century Christian proselytizer and martyr, most often depicted as a handsome youth shot with arrows. Not a bad guess. Not 100 percent correct, either. “Don’t you have customers who wonder about the origin of the name?” I asked him. “I mean, you named your shop after the martyrs.”

“The only origin my customers want to know is the origin of the strawberries and lemons in my pastries,” said Sébastien.

The most creative explanation I heard came from an elderly
woman who said she had lived on “the street of married men” for forty years.

“What street is that?” I asked.

“The street of married men—the martyrs! People call the rue des Martyrs the street of married men because they are all persecuted by their wives.”

I met my match—almost—in Bruno Blanckaert, a businessman who invested in the Miroir bistro. He said he had thoroughly researched the topic and found three explanations. “The first is that the name is linked to a religious congregation,” he said. “The second relates to people who had been in prison on the rue des Martyrs. The third is what you find in the most authoritative text,
Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris
(Historical Dictionary of the Streets of Paris), which states that nobody is really sure.”

He argued with such precision that I hesitated to question him. Seeing my bemused expression, he asked, his voice filled with authority, “And you? Do
you
know the explanation?”

“I’ll give you a hint,” I said. “There was a martyr who was made a saint.”

Bruno laughed. “Ah, you’re not telling me right away.”

“You should know this!” I said. “What if a client comes into your bistro and asks, ‘Monsieur Blanckaert, how did the rue des Martyrs get its name?’”

“I will give my three explanations, because how do I know your answer is the right one?” he said.

“You want me to tell you? You really do?”

He did. And so I told him.

AS I PLUNGED DEEPER
into the archives, I learned that the rue des Martyrs did not always have this name. As early as the eleventh century, the road walked by the three martyrs was known as chemin des Martyrs, or “path of the Martyrs.” The path originated in the center of Paris and continued all the way to the top of the Montmartre hill; the present-day rue des Martyrs is toward the end of that path. Beginning in 1290, the lower part of the street became the rue des Porcherons, after a wealthy local family whose “village” included a large swath of what is now the Ninth Arrondissement. But the street was sometimes considered an extension of the rue du Faubourg Montmartre, which is how it is identified by the Turgot maps of 1734–36, a series of twenty highly accurate bird’s-eye views of Paris. The name “rue des Martyrs” did not arrive until 1750—and it disappeared for thirteen years, between 1793 and 1806, when the French Revolution purged names evoking God, the Virgin Mary, saints, and angels. During those years, it was called “the street of the Field of Repose.” Not until 1860 did the rue des Martyrs unite with the chaussée des Martyrs, its extension into Montmartre; in 1868 the rue des Martyrs as we know it was created.

The story of the “martyrs” became even more muddled after Zygmunt Blazynsky, caretaker of the crypt believed to be the site of Saint Denis’s beheading, told me that Rusticus and Eleutherius, his sidekicks, may never have existed. He had no evidence either way, but I discovered more about them in a doctoral dissertation,
The Liturgical Faces of Saint Denis,
by Tova Leigh-Choate.

An American scholar who studied at Yale, she is one of the
world’s living experts on Saint Denis. She wrote that Rusticus and Eleutherius probably weren’t known before the seventh or eighth centuries—several centuries after they supposedly lost their heads. All I can say for sure about them is that they became saints and had streets in Paris named in their honor.

In fact, Saint Denis himself may not be who we think he is. There were multiple Denises in early Christianity, and their stories were conflated into one over the course of the Middle Ages. Denis Number One is Dionysius the Areopagite, a first-century disciple and convert of Saint Paul who is mentioned in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles. Denis Number Two is our Saint Denis, the decapitated, head-carrying, third-century martyr. Denis Number Three is a second Dionysius the Areopagite, also now known as Pseudo-Dionysius, a fifth- or sixth-century theologian of the East so caught up in mysticism that he dropped hints in his writings that he was Denis Number One. Denis Number Three was so convincing that Hilduin incorporated his writings into his ninth-century work on Saint Denis.

The whole truth may never be told.

“My personal thoughts are that a certain Dionysius missionary-bishop probably existed in the third century or later, and he may well have been martyred,” Leigh-Choate said in a series of e-mail exchanges. “If he existed, surely he had disciples, whether their names were Rusticus and Eleutherius or not (probably not). The rest of the story . . . well, it’s a good story.”

Leigh-Choate said it doesn’t really matter whether Rusticus, Eleutherius, or even Denis ever walked the earth. Their importance is their impact on history and what people have believed about them over the centuries. “Denis was one of the most important saints of the Middle Ages,” she said. “The Christian
identities of the kingdom of France and the French church itself were intimately linked with the Saint Denis story. But his star fell with the French Revolution and, frankly, he’s not that revered any longer.”

So were Denis—the idol-smashing, head-carrying preacher-saint—and his companions real? And if they were not, why couldn’t the rue des Martyrs represent all of the martyrs of French history, even its married men?

SOME OF MY FAVORITE GHOSTS

. . .

Come with me down this street
and meet the ghosts of our earliest years.

—J
ULIEN
G
REEN,
P
ARIS

F
ROM TIME TO TIME ON THE RUE DES MARTYRS, I HAVE
imaginary conversations with Thomas Jefferson. He knew this neighborhood well, and in the early morning as the damp night fog lifts, I am sure I can make out his ghost. It vaguely resembles Nick Nolte, who played Jefferson in that gilded 1995 Merchant-Ivory film
Jefferson in Paris
.

Jefferson found friendship and talked politics on the rue des Martyrs, and he cultivated an illicit love just a few blocks away. But he is only one of many ghosts on this street. They congregate at Le Dream Café, at No. 8. I can’t prove it. But sometimes, as I sip a
café crème,
I feel their presence: a face stares from the foam in my coffee cup; a paper napkin flies off the table when the air is still; a cold wind brushes my cheek.

Some may accuse me of a self-indulgent imagination, or of
just frittering away too much time at a comfortable table at No. 8. But consider that Allan Kardec, who systematized and popularized spiritism, a way of talking to dead people, lived just above where I am sitting as I drink my coffee. Kardec was the pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, a nineteenth-century French writer, educator, and translator. He spoke several languages and taught such subjects as mathematics, physics, comparative anatomy, chemistry, and astronomy. From 1855 to 1860, he conducted very unusual activities from his two-room apartment on the third floor of this very building.

At least once a week, Kardec hosted sessions for fellow believers with a medium who made contact with the spirits. He also had lively conversations at home, but not with just anyone. He talked to Socrates, Homer, Mozart, Benjamin Franklin, Swedenborg, Napoleon, and a gaggle of saints, including John the Evangelist, Augustine, Vincent de Paul, and Louis. I like to think the conversations were fascinating. “Tell me, John, how did it feel when you discovered that Jesus had risen from the dead?” Or: “My dear Emperor Napoleon, if you had to fight Waterloo all over again, what would you do differently?”

Kardec said “superior spirits” ordered him to write a book codifying his findings.
The Spirits’ Book,
the first of his five-volume guide, was a best seller when it appeared in 1857. I picked up a copy of the much shorter, watered-down version of Kardec’s opus, titled
What Is Spiritism?,
which appeared two years later and is still in print. I learned, alas, that spiritism could not help me predict fluctuations in the stock market; make my fortune; know the future; produce an invention ready to be marketed; or discover coal mines, lost inheritances, or hidden treasure.

Spiritism attracted famous followers, including Thomas
Edison, who tried to invent a machine to communicate with beings in the afterlife, and Victor Hugo, who wrote, “Turning a blind eye to the spiritist phenomena is turning a blind eye to the truth.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, exposed himself to ridicule with his belief in spiritism. (Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 to devote himself to writing about spiritism but brought him back to life years later because of popular demand—and a need for an income.)

Spiritism still has a healthy following around the world, particularly in Brazil, where millions of people believe in communicating with the dead and spiritism is treated as a respected religion. Spiritists there are called “Kardecists” and run day-care centers, libraries, clinics, hospitals, and retirement homes. In 2007, Brazil’s National Congress named April 18 the National Day of Spiritism in honor of the first date of publication of
The Book of Spirits
. Spiritism has figured into the plots of Brazilian films, plays, and soap operas. I occasionally see guidebook-carrying Brazilian Kardecists in front of No. 8 rue des Martyrs paying homage to Kardec—and perhaps trying to make contact with deceased friends and relatives.