The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (13 page)

When Kardec died in 1869, he was buried in the vast Père-Lachaise cemetery, on the eastern fringe of Paris. His grave is unusual: his bust in bronze sits beneath a large stone replica of an ancient portal tomb. His followers believe they can make contact with the spirit world by placing their hands on the statue. The tomb is adorned with more flowers than any other at Père-Lachaise—quite extraordinary, considering that Chopin, Proust, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Colette, and Jim Morrison are also buried there.

EVERY CITY HAS ITS FAMOUS GHOSTS
. Paris, with its long history and enduring magnetism for artists and writers, has more than most. A surprising number of them walk the rue des Martyrs. I sometimes sense Kardec himself sitting next to me at No. 8 as I think about the stories, some tame, some exotic, of the well-known people who lived, died, worked, or played on the street. The headless march of Saint Denis up to Montmartre was only the beginning.

Could the small boy playing outside the hair salon and shoe repair shop at No. 40 be Maurice Ravel, the composer, who lived here for five years of his childhood, from 1875 to 1880?

Is that Honoré de Balzac, the prolific but financially troubled novelist, visiting his sister Laure at No. 47, where an American-style cookie shop opened?

Is the beggar on the rue des Martyrs at the corner of rue Hippolyte-Lebas the reincarnation of Paul Léautaud, an eccentric twentieth-century writer who lived on the street as a child? As an adult, Léautaud kept dozens of cats and dogs. Every day, dressed in rags and a hat, Léautaud asked the butcher, the baker, and the greengrocer for food to give his animals. Had he returned to his old neighborhood to beg?

The Carlos Cheio bakery and sandwich shop, at No. 65, opens early and caters to students at the high school next door. It stands on the site of the now-vanished neoclassical home of the Belgian artist Alfred Stevens. He displayed his exceptional art collection—paintings by Holbein, Géricault, Delacroix, Rousseau, Millet, Manet, and Morisot—and invited friends to paint views of his garden. He also ran a painting school with mostly female students. Parisian high society and great European and American art collectors clamored to visit. But in 1882, the house, with its large garden,
was demolished in the name of progress, to be replaced by Haussmannian buildings and the newly created rue Alfred Stevens. If I had lived here back then, I hope I would have protested the change.

Do I see Pablo Picasso in the neighborhood? He lived for a brief time in 1909 in an artists’ colony at No. 11 boulevard de Clichy, not far from the rue des Martyrs. In one of the first rooms in the Picasso Museum in the Marais, which reopened in 2014, hangs an oil painting in shades of gray, depicting the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in winter. It is an example of Picasso’s early cubist work and, except for the rounded main dome, a riotous celebration of angles. Could he have painted it from somewhere on the rue des Martyrs? The museum reopening also drew attention to Picasso’s inability to throw out the relics of his past. Among the two hundred thousand personal papers he left behind were cigar boxes with ticket stubs from cinemas, bullfights, and circuses, including the Cirque Medrano on the rue des Martyrs. (I discovered the existence of several circus ticket stubs during the Picasso-mania that accompanied the reopening of the Picasso Museum, when new details about his daily life came to light.)

Artists left their paint spatters all over this neighborhood. Delacroix lived and worked on the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Gauguin lived at the place Saint-Georges. Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and Monet all bought their paints from the celebrated Père Tanguy shop on the rue Clauzel off the rue des Martyrs.

Then there is the ghost of Théodore Géricault, most likely to be glimpsed on horseback. A painter who is considered the first of the Romantics and best known for
The Raft of the Medusa,
Géricault used his studio on the rue des Martyrs as a love nest. The best-known scandal involved his affair with his model Alex
andrine, who was married to his uncle, a man twenty-seven years her senior. She bore Géricault a son, who was given up for adoption. After her husband learned of the affair, he kept her a virtual prisoner at their home near Versailles.

Géricault endured a very different suffering. In 1823, he fell off his horse on the rue des Martyrs and was badly injured. His health deteriorated, and he died a year later, at the age of thirty-two. Some people believe that the rue des Martyrs was named after his “martyrdom” on a horse. (According to another version, his death was caused by venereal disease.)

Musicians came here, too. Claude Debussy led songs and Erik Satie played piano at the rowdy cabaret Le Chat Noir on the rue Victor-Massé. Later in the twentieth century, Gabby and Haynes, Paris’s soul food restaurant off the rue des Martyrs, served its spare ribs, honey fried chicken, shrimp gumbo, and kidney beans to Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Sidney Bechet, and Count Basie. If I listen hard enough, I can almost hear their music.

It is only logical that I feel the ghostly presences of the rue des Martyrs most strongly at Le Dream Café, at No. 8, not only because of Kardec, but also because the greatest concentration of ghosts in the neighborhood is across the street at No. 7. Any of them might be stealing my napkin or blowing me a kiss. Now a Carrefour supermarket, in the second half of the nineteenth century No. 7 was the Brasserie des Martyrs, one of the most famous Paris nightspots.

The Brasserie des Martyrs was not fancy. It had a large, glazed double door that led into a cavernous space lit with gas lamps. There was no sign outside, no frescoes or gilding or decorations on the walls inside except for a naïve painting of “King
Gambrinus”—the legendary patron of beer—raising a foamy glass. (The brasserie was famous for its beer.)

But it was also a place that defined literary bohemia. Some of the best artists and writers of the era gathered there, to have their reputations made or destroyed. “Each great man had his table, which became the nucleus, the center of a whole clique of admirers,” wrote the novelist Alphonse Daudet in
Thirty Years of Paris and of My Literary Life
in 1888. “They were called Bohemians, and the name did not displease them.”

The “thinkers” had their own table. (“They say nothing, they write nothing, they just think. . . . Bald heads, flowing beards, with an odor of strong tobacco, cabbage soup, and philosophy.”)

At another table were the “smocks, berets, animal noises, rough jokes, punsters, crowded together in glorious confusion: those are artists, painters, and sculptors.” The painters Courbet and the much younger Monet developed a close friendship at the Brasserie.

The writer du jour, Henri Murger, whom Daudet called “the Homer and Columbus of this little world,” reigned over the central table. He had made his reputation—and a lot of money—on
Scenes of Bohemian Life
, an 1848 work that was first published in serial form and then rewritten as a play. Murger became prosperous enough to move to the rue des Martyrs from the other side of the river, and Giacomo Puccini turned his book into
La Bohème,
one of the most popular operas of all time. I’m certain their ghosts would visit if the supermarket played “Mi chiamano Mimi” over the loudspeaker.

Then there were the women, described by Daudet as “former models, fine creatures, but somewhat faded in appearance. . . . Curious specimens of a singular refinement, having passed from hand to hand, and caught from their thousand and one liaisons a veneer of artistic erudition. They express their opinions on every
subject, and according to the lover of the moment, declare themselves materialists or idealists, Catholics or atheists. Touching, and at the same time somewhat ridiculous.”

But more than any other, it is the ghost of the poet Charles Baudelaire that hovers here. Baudelaire lived nearby on the rue Pigalle, where he wrote critiques of art and music and used the Brasserie des Martyrs as a sort of private club. He sat at Murger’s table, where he argued about art and drank too much. Daudet described Baudelaire as “tormented in art by a thirst for the undiscoverable, in philosophy by the alluring terror of the unknown.” He slowly poisoned himself with drink and opium, contracted syphilis, became paralyzed, and died penniless.

Not everyone appreciated the Brasserie des Martyrs. “A tavern and a cavern of all the great men without names, of all the Bohemians of petty journalism. Heavy, annoying, ignoble atmosphere” is how the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who lived nearby on the rue Saint-Georges, described it in their
Journal
in May 1857.

The writers of this stern judgment were not the first or the last to see an “ignoble” side of the rue des Martyrs. The street became even more infamous after Émile Zola, who lived for years in the neighborhood, published
Nana,
his 1880 novel about the depraved life of a Parisian prostitute. Zola’s portrayal of lesbian subculture was one of the first ever in mainstream European literature. He described a lesbian
table d’hôte
with a three-franc dinner run by a “monstrous creature” of fifty named Laure Piédefer and set it on the rue des Martyrs. In one crucial episode, Nana’s sexually ambiguous prostitute friend Satin introduces her to the same-sex world by bringing her to dine at Laure’s. They are served the “old substantial dinner you get in a country hotel”: puff
pastry
à la financière
, stewed chicken with rice, beans
au jus,
and vanilla cream glazed with burnt sugar.

If the food is unexceptional, the company is not. Nana is at first confused and repelled by seeing so many women having such a good time together. Satin slips away without telling her, presumably with another woman. Nana is left to pay the bill, and standing outside on the rue des Martyrs, “felt her bitterness increasing.” But soon afterward, she is intrigued: “Her curiosity was even excited,” and she began questioning Satin about “obscure vices.” Despite her extensive sexual experience, Nana “was astounded to be adding to her information at her time of life and with her knowledge.” Satin seduces Nana and becomes her lover—or, as Zola puts it, “her vice.”

The ghost of Zola is a certainty of the rue des Martyrs; is Nana here, too?

Another ghost is Antonin Dubost, a senator for twenty-four years and the president of the Senate between 1906 and 1920. Why doesn’t a plaque celebrate No. 10 rue des Martyrs, where he died? The ground floor of the building has been the site of a bakery since 1868. But Dubost didn’t go there to buy baguettes. The upper floors housed a prosperous brothel for rich and powerful politicians, businessmen, even priests. One night after Dubost received what was described as a “special massage” from one of the women, he collapsed and died.

I collect old picture postcards. Sometimes I spend hours at Parisian antiquarian shops sifting through them, hunting for images—or, even better, messages—that speak to me. Sometimes the hunt uncovers more ghosts of the rue des Martyrs—and perhaps more evidence of its former reputation. Who was the polite gentleman who sent a postcard of the vast garden of La Providence, a former
refuge for the poor that is now a retirement home, to an unnamed “Mademoiselle” in 1924? He told her he would love to see her and introduce her to his friends when she returned to Paris from the United States. Who was the tortured soul, nicknamed Moune, who sent a postcard picturing the bottom of the rue des Martyrs to Toutou in 1906? She asked for forgiveness for not writing, said she would love him forever, complained about the high price of butter in Paris, and branded the rue des Martyrs a “nasty street.”

Eventually I decided to tell Mahmoud Allili, the owner of Le Dream Café, about his building’s special status in the world of Parisian ghosts. It was June 2014, and he was sitting at an outdoor table, waiting to greet customers for the France-Honduras World Cup soccer match that night. He had strung flags of the participating countries across the front of the café and was showing all the matches on huge television screens.

“Do you know that a very famous person lived here?” I asked him.

“All I know is that foreigners come here all the time and ask to take pictures in front of No. 8,” he replied.

He said he found it amusing because the door is so plain—unadorned metal painted a shade of lavender. I told him about Kardec and spiritism, and explained that Kardec had lived on the third floor.

“So let’s go in and see!” he said.

“You know the door code?”

“I live here.”

Mahmoud punched in the numbers and led me and my daughter Gabriela to the end of a narrow courtyard. He pushed open the door and told us to follow. It was a simple entrance without an elevator. We climbed a dark staircase to a blue metal door on the
third floor. “This,” he said, pointing with a flourish, “is the door!” He posed so Gabriela could take a photo.

I was disappointed. It all seemed so ordinary—and I saw no ghosts.

When we returned, Mahmoud put a chair in front of the building’s door. He sat down, crossed his arms, and posed again as the soccer match was about to begin.