Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (20 page)

While the wine and absinthe flowed no one in his bohemian circle really believed Modi would ensure for himself that “short but full life” by committing suicide. No one, that is, except Jeanne Hébuterne. She was the last of his many lovers, the mother of his daughter Jeanne, and the mother-to-be of his second child. It was with her, some historians think, that Modi swore a death pact. He drank and smoked himself to death and though nine months pregnant, Jeanne Hébuterne threw herself from the fifth-floor window of her parents’ apartment the day after Modi died in an unheated garret in Montparnasse.

But we were getting ahead of ourselves. Modigliani may have lived his last years and died in Montparnasse, though you won’t find his spirit there today, despite the “Terrasse Modigliani,” a dreary parking lot next to the Montparnasse train station, or the “Atelier Modigliani,” his garret, marked by a plaque at 8 Rue de la Grande Chaumière. It’s when you wander the streets of Montmartre that the tragic artist’s presence seems to flit past you down the zigzag staircases and atmospheric alleys of this hallowed hill capped by Sacré-Coeur.

We decided to rewind to 1906, the year Modi arrived from Italy by train and headed straight for what people called back then La Butte. At the time Montmartre’s hilly sprawl took in vacant lots; scruffy, unpaved streets lined by crumbling two-story buildings; windmills, vineyards, and orchards on the city’s northern edge. Sundown on a drizzly fall weekday seemed like a good time to me to hit the streets of the Butte; when the light begins to fade the tourist crowds thin but the parks, shops, and cafés remain open. We took the Métro to the Anvers station and, swept along by a crowd of Franco-African locals, made our way up narrow Rue Steinkerque, a straight shot to Square Willette at the base of the staircase leading to Sacré-Coeur. A merry-go-round spun to sour-sounding music. Amid the primly dressed children and their minders sat clutches of placid winos. Modi and his painter pal Maurice Utrillo often sat in this square and sketched the city and the passersby while guzzling cheap wine. Then they would hike up the hill on steep, plaited staircases, past the white hulk of Sacré-Coeur basilica, pausing, perhaps, to stare at the skeletal silhouette of the teenage Tour Eiffel before following the dog’s-leg alleys to Place du Tertre where Modi lived.

We dodged an elephant train carrying weary tourists and poked around the souvenir stands looking for Modi. Among the Sacré-Coeur snow-shower paperweights, pot metal Eiffel Tower replicas, and Amélie Poulain posters, we spotted several T-shirts emblazoned with the stylized, elongated, sad-eyed women Modi preferred. I reflected on the fact that a hundred years ago, for the current price of a T-shirt—around fifteen dollars—I could have bought several original Modigliani canvasses. He disdained money. The cost of living in his day was only a fraction of what it is now but even that doesn’t alter the equation: Modi wanted only enough for daily survival with something left over to buy his artist’s materials.

We took a table at La Bohème du Tertre and did some mental burrowing backward, down an imaginary time tunnel, to the days when Modi lived in a cheap furnished room above this venerable café, now a tourist trap. Back then the square was the center of an artists’ colony—most of them authentic, serious, academy-trained artists. They chose the Butte because rents were low yet it was within walking distance of central Paris. In those dying days of the Belle Époque there were already tourists a-plenty on the hill. Some were drawn by Sacré-Coeur, others by the cabarets, cafés, and restaurants. As Alison and I sipped our overpriced beers I was torn by conflicting emotions, at once troubled by the tour-bus hordes yet conscious of being part of them, repelled yet fascinated by the Butte’s world-class kitsch. Accordions wheezed. Yellow pennants fluttered by as tour group leaders gave directions through bullhorns. I wondered if there were an undiscovered Modi, Picasso, or Foujita among the caricaturists and other self-styled artists, most of them non-French, soliciting in the square. Modi was Italian, after all, Picasso Spanish, and Foujita Japanese. Each had made his fortune on the Butte’s scuffed and littered pavements while others had fallen by the wayside.

During the months Modi lodged above the café where we now sat he had been a tired-eyed regular in the square’s troughs but especially at the Clarion des Chasseurs (in business since 1790) and La Mère Catherine, where a full meal cost under a franc—the equivalent in purchasing power of a few dollars today. Naturally both spots charge many times that now, and do a lively trade indoors among bric-a-brac and on shaded terraces using their long-dead, famous artist-patrons to create a faux bohemian setting.

Modi ranged over the Butte for three years, camping in at least five different places. The first was a ramshackle studio in a shantytown area called Le Maquis—a reference to the wild and woolly Corsican outback where thieves, murderers, and renegades hid out. An elderly local woman I buttonholed in a street north of Place du Tertre seemed to think she’d heard of Le Maquis. She pointed down Rue Norvins. We explored until we came to the evocatively named Allée des Brouillards—meaning, literally, fog alley—whose pocket-size front yards were overgrown with tangled, twisted shrubs. From it we crossed a small square into a park with another evocative name, Le Hameau des Artistes—the artists’ hamlet. A group of neighborhood seniors polished their steel balls and tossed them down the gravel-and-dirt lanes of none other than Le Maquis, which is now a
boulodrome
, the French answer to a lawn-bowling alley. They glanced over but apparently could not be troubled to acknowledge our presence. I understood. The Butte’s inhabitants live in parallel to the tourist flows.

The current incarnation of Le Maquis struck me as something the rebellious, left-leaning Modi might have liked (he often wore a red handkerchief around his neck in the style of the Italian revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi). The artists’ studios of old had been razed, but at least no high-rise apartment buildings had taken their place. The
boule
players appeared to be from the working class, and in the corners of the park sat more of the Butte’s winos and outcasts.

Behind the walls of what is now 11 Rue Norvins is a garden fronting the centuries-old house in which Modi lived briefly with English journalist Beatrice Hastings. She famously described him as “at once pearl and swine.” Like her swinish lover, the man-eating Beatrice was no stranger to the bottle. She and Modi often fought and on one occasion he reportedly heaved her out of the window into the shrubbery. She was too drunk to notice, however, and the affair continued on and off for years, even after Modi moved to Montparnasse.

Another hundred yards away in a sloping residential square called Place Jean-Baptiste Clément, Modi worked in a studio at number seven (it has since been transformed into a handsome residence with an ivy-clad garden wall). In the early 1900s the neighborhood was edgy, so Modi often carried a pistol—at least, that is, when he was dressed. Apparently he enjoyed dancing naked at night in this lopsided square with his demi-monde models, most of them prostitutes whom he somehow managed to transform in his paintings into ethereal, Madonna-like beings.

To indulge the growing sense of yesteryear enfolding us, we decided to walk a few blocks back to Rue Cortot and peek into the Musée de Montmartre before it shut. With old-fashioned streetlights flickering and a sheen on the cobbles, the set of weathered 1600s buildings separated by a garden exuded a crepuscular charm. This was where Renoir lived in the 1870s, followed, in the early 1900s, by the self-taught Utrillo (and his mother Suzanne Valadon, a better painter than he). Modi is sure to have known the museum’s mossy yard and creaking wooden floors. I imagined him now on the window sill, taking in the sweeping views, cluttered today by apartment towers. Though scrubbed and refitted to handle mass-market tourism, the museum nonetheless manages to transport visitors back in time. One room replicates the interior of Utrillo and Modi’s much-loved Café de l’Abreuvoir, complete with bentwood chairs, wooden tables, and period posters. Staring out from the dusty memorabilia was the treasure I’d been looking for, a 1918 Modigliani portrait of a swan-necked, almond-eyed woman he doubtless loved, if only for a moment.

Up Rue des Saules a block or so is Montmartre’s last vineyard, a terraced reminder of the neighborhood’s vinous past, and kitty-corner to it spreads the small cemetery among whose toppled tombstones Modi liked to wander at night. But this street corner is best known for Au Lapin Agile, a
café-concert
open only at night. If you’re an adept of kitsch, it’s a fine place to experience Old Montmartre song-and-dance routines performed in roistering surroundings. The establishment started out as Le Cabaret des Assassins but became known as “Le Lapin à Gill” when in 1880 a painter named André Gill created its now-famous sign showing a rabbit in a red bowtie springing from a copper saucepan. The name eventually morphed to “the agile rabbit.” It was already an old standby in Modi’s day, famed for its absinthe and anything-goes atmosphere. Modigliani went there once in 1909 with the Italian Futurist painter Gino Severini, who was carrying with him Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” calling for the destruction of Venice—the Lagoon City had to be flattened, according to Marinetti, because it was ancient, rotten, and an impediment to progress. Ever cordial, Modi shared a bottle or three with Severini but refused to sign. In his memoirs Severini described the evening, and the walls of Au Lapin Agile, which were covered with paintings, including a Picasso rose-period
Harlequin
self-portrait titled
Au Lapin Agile
. Artists, including Modigliani, routinely paid their bills here with artworks. The owner, Frédéric Gérard, alias Frédé, had a donkey named Lolo and when it was cold outside he’d bring Lolo in and let him wander among the penurious painters and intellectuals, sometimes with a paintbrush attached to his tail. Nowadays the cabaret’s historic sign and the street corner itself are outwardly much the same as they were in the Belle Époque but the clientele couldn’t be more different.

Relieved that the cabaret was not yet open and thus preserved from temptation, we strolled back down Rue des Saules, found tilting Rue Ravignan and zigzagged into Place Goudeau. A green, cast-iron Wallace fountain from the 1870s splashed the cobbles under horse-chestnut trees so old that Modi surely knew them. On the square’s right flank was the display case of the once-infamous Bateau-Lavoir, an artist’s residence. A vintage photograph showed a bare-bones turn-of-the-century studio. Inside we were pleasantly surprised to discover a hive of art students, many apparently convinced of their budding genius. Though completely rebuilt as a nondescript dormitory after a fire in 1970, thanks to that period photo it’s easy enough to picture in the mind’s eye what the Bateau-Lavoir, a converted piano factory clinging to the hillside, must have been like in its heyday, around 1908. That’s when Modi got himself a room, a noisy, messy cubbyhole separated by thin panels and hanging fabric from other cubbyholes occupied by the likes of Derain, Juan Gris, and Picasso. Modi disliked Picasso, the inventor of Cubism, and hated Picasso’s aggressive angular art. After several violent altercations Modigliani moved across the street to a seedy rooming house (in a building that no longer exists).

Like the crown of Montmartre, the Bateau-Lavoir is tame these days, an enclave of distinctly bourgeois bohemians. Despite widespread gentrification, however, it would be wrong to assume that the Butte’s edgy quality has entirely disappeared. The last dive Modi rented was at the base of the hill, an address in Rue André Antoine. At its Pigalle end, when the sun goes down this cobbled road is almost as malodorous and filthy, and populated with marginal fauna, as it was a hundred years ago. To get there we coasted downhill to the packed cafés of Rue des Abbesses, where Modi and his barfly friend Utrillo would drink themselves silly. A staircase with many flights flanks the Café Saint-Jean, still a local hangout with a zinc-topped bar. We tossed back a
ballon
of red then clattered down the slippery, uneven stairs. Several hundred yards along the crooked alley we found ourselves among Pigalle’s creatures of the night—Brazilian transvestites, nervy drug dealers and their disconcertingly normal-looking clients. As we reached the neon-lit Boulevard de Clichy I paused for a final glance back at the Butte and couldn’t help wondering if, with his capacity to empathize and his painterly talents, Modi would be able to elevate Pigalle’s modern-day denizens from gutter to empyrean. It was a vain thought, perhaps, but it buoyed me nonetheless.

The Boat People of the Seine

The rear of the riverboat coughed out black smoke … the propeller started to spin … Jules Naud had caught something with his boathook … it was a man’s arm, the whole arm from the shoulder to the hand. Soaking in the water it had acquired a bloodless color and had the consistency of dead fish …

—G
EORGES
S
IMENON
,
Maigret et le corps sans tête
, 1955