Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (22 page)

But the town’s center of gravity, it turned out, is an old white riverboat named
Je Sers
—I serve. Its captain at the time was the spiritual guide of the boat people’s community, an aging priest named Père Arthur. Most French boatmen are practicing Catholics, and the big moments of their lives from cradle to grave are played out in the company of the presiding priest. The blessing of the fleet is the summer season’s signal event in both Conflans and nearby Longueil-Annel, a placid backwater upstream on the Oise River. I joined the priest and dozens of boatmen on a garlanded old Freycinet with a makeshift altar and glided into Longueil where hundreds of boat families, their craft streaming with banners, processed to the riverbank to receive their blessing. It was a moving sight, even for a freethinker. But the festive air was tinged with solemnity. Père Arthur would soon move to Lille, and some of the boats present were receiving their last rites. They would become floating clubhouses or cafés, noted the priest as we motored back to Conflans. This was preferable to the fate suffered by others in the bad old days of the 1990s: they were sent to what locals call the “boat cemetery,” in reality a scrap yard in a dead branch of the Seine directly opposite Conflans. Though now closed the scrap yard is a constant reminder to
bateliers
of the precariousness of their situation.

As I stared across the river at the boat cemetery a young
batelier
stood next to me and defiantly swore he would survive against the odds. “I’ll get a bigger boat if I have to,” he said. “I’ll work on someone else’s boat if I have to. But I’ll never leave the river.” They were hard words spoken with passionate determination. I would remember them the next time I sat sipping white wine with our friends on their houseboat near the Eiffel Tower.

Meeting Moreau

He paints dreams … sophisticated, complicated, enigmatic dreams
.

—É
MILE
Z
OLA

once met a dead man in Paris named Gustave Moreau. It happened one rainy morning in the 1980s when I had nothing particular to do. I was drawn to the Passage Verdeau, a nineteenth-century, glass-and-ironwork shopping arcade just north of Boulevard Montmartre in the dowdy 9th arrondissement. A thin coat of dust hung on old storefronts such as Pascal Entremont Chasseur de Pierres, a rock collector’s shop; and Photo Verdeau, with its array of early cameras in worn leather cases. The doors of some of the Passage Verdeau’s establishments seemed to have rusted shut. Yet there were the clerks and salesmen bent behind their desks, waiting patiently for the rare customer.

At a bookseller and curio shop appropriately called La France Ancienne I was delighted to discover a box of old postcards marked
sculpture, peinture, beaux-arts
. Looking out at me from among the fountains of Rome and the statuary of Versailles was the portrait of a man with a bushy white beard and the eyes of a seer or a maniac. The card was postmarked 1908. In faded black ink the sender had scrawled “A bizarre and disappointing place.”

The postcard had come from the Musée Gustave Moreau. It showed a self-portrait of the artist. The name rang a bell. Where had I seen the work of Gustave Moreau? Wasn’t he the Symbolist, the enigmatic recluse who’d lived during the heyday of Impressionism?

Intrigued, I bought the postcard. The museum, if it still existed, was only a few blocks north of the Passage Verdeau, beyond the Folies Bergère and the cheap clothes shops and eateries of the unfashionable Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre. Around here and in nearby Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, I recalled, were the brasseries and cafés Émile Zola described in his bleakly evocative novels of nineteenth-century Paris life. This was “the last bright and animated corner of nocturnal Paris” where Zola’s notorious lady of the night, Nana, and swarms of others in the trade did their business “as though along the open corridor of a brothel.”

Could this be where Gustave Moreau had lived? Though most of the prostitutes had moved out, the neighborhood wasn’t that different in feel—rundown, tired, soulful, seedy, a slice of ungentrified inner city. I walked north past the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, remarkable for its gracelessness, then got turned around in Place Saint-Georges. It was more a traffic circle than a proper square but it had character. No one I asked had heard of the Musée Gustave Moreau—try the Marais, suggested one helpful resident. “The Marais is where all the museums are …”

I was about to give up when I came across Rue de La Rochefoucauld. That was the address on the postcard. Wedged between the faded, staid apartment buildings of vaguely Second Empire–style was number fourteen, an ungainly neo-Renaissance brick palazzo. On it was a plaque and an old-fashioned brass doorbell. Visitors were to ring and enter.

“A bizarre and disappointing place”—the words came back to me as I climbed the stairs to the ticket desk. I surprised the woman dozing there. No one else was around. At the foot of the worn and poorly lit staircase I spotted a handwritten biographical sketch of the artist. Gustave Moreau was born April 6, 1826, in Paris, the son of a successful architect. He dearly loved his mother, with whom he lived for decades, until her death. He never married. A student at the École Royale des Beaux-Arts, he traveled extensively in Italy and later showed his work in various salons. Finally, in 1883, at the height of his unusual career, he was named Officer of the Legion of Honor.

Moreau died in this house in 1898, where he had lived and worked for nearly fifty years. He willed the house and its contents to the state with the proviso that it be maintained as it was. The museum was created a few years later and remained virtually unchanged for a century. In it are some twelve hundred paintings, watercolors, and cartoons, and five thousand drawings. Moreau threw nothing away. For the record, only Turner and Picasso have left a greater body of work to posterity.

On the first-floor landing of the house hangs a large drawing of a Persian poet riding a unicorn. Beside it is a sketch of an effeminate Oedipus apparently being seduced or raped by a lascivious Sphinx.

But nothing could prepare me for what I found on the second floor. In a huge hall, scores of oil paintings hang floor-to-ceiling on three sides. The fourth wall of large windows illuminates the room in any weather. Here was the Virgin Mary, depicted as a jewel-encrusted pistil protruding from a giant lily. The artist called the work
The Mystical Flower
. In
The Chimerae
, a hundred or more female creatures make love to dragonflies, snakes, and turtles. Behind them rises a fairytale medieval city at the foot of a rocky precipice surmounted by a tiny cross. This overtly misogynistic work the painter described cryptically as “a satanic
Decameron
” (presumably referring to Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century tales, many of them prurient) and “an island of fantastic dreams enclosing every form of passion, fantasy and caprice of Woman” (the capitalized “W” is the artist’s).

I scanned my memory for an explanation. Did it lie, perhaps, in the fact that during Moreau’s adult life, which coincided with what we now call the Belle Époque, relations between men and women stood at a critical juncture? The first assault on patriarchal society had been mounted—a kind of proto-Women’s Liberation Movement was under way. A favorite theme of many male artists of the time, especially Symbolists such as Moreau, was the tale of Salomé—the devilish temptress—usually shown dancing or lustily holding Saint John the Baptist’s head on a platter. I glanced around. There she was, among the unicorns and swans, lilies and acanthus leaves.

Winged horses pranced and swayed with the reinterpreted mythological or biblical figures in
The Return of the Argonauts, The Daughters of Thespius
, and many other larger-than-life-size canvases, some of them only half-finished, all of them stylistically very different. What did this hodgepodge of symbols mean? Was Moreau insane or had he, like many artists of his day, been an opium addict?

I sat in the center of the room feeling dizzy. A lone museum guard paced back and forth in front of the wall of windows where a gray, glary light poured in from the equally gray, unappealing neighborhood beyond. I wondered where the crowds of the Louvre or the Picasso Museum were. A bizarre place this was, as my old postcard suggested, but not disappointing.

Unable to make sense of the paintings, I decided to go back down to the entrance area and see if there was a catalogue for sale. When I stood the guard approached me. “Aren’t you going to look at the third floor?” she asked. How could there possibly be more of this, I asked without thinking. “But you’ve only started, monsieur,” she retorted, pointing to an unusual spiral staircase—a double helix, in fact. “The best is on the third floor!”

I assured her politely that I would return, then dashed down the stairs.

On the way out of the building I bought a catalogue and began to read it as I walked. The bells of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and La Trinité, another nearby temple of architectural gracelessness, were tolling noon. The streets, though as outwardly drab as before, started to take on a new meaning for me. Here, said the catalogue, in Rue de La Rochefoucauld, Nana had kept a room. Zola himself had lived a few blocks away in Rue Ballu. This was where Charles Dickens had had his disappointing encounter with Frédéric Chopin’s celebrated lover George Sand, “the kind of woman in appearance whom you might suppose to be the Queen’s monthly nurse.” Turgenev and Thackeray and a dozen other writers and painters had lived in the area, within a few hundred yards of Moreau’s house. The ateliers and galleries had apparently been as thick here then as they are now on the Left Bank or in the Marais. The streets had been alive. During Moreau’s day the neighborhood was known as The New Athens, and even spawned its own architectural style, heavy with Hellenistic, classical references. Moreau in his youth frequented the salons, restaurants, and cafés with his great friend and fellow painter Théodore Chassériau, who was also among the nineteenth-century’s most successful artists, at least from the commercial standpoint.

But as I walked by, on Place Saint-Georges there was only one modest café. Cars swerved around the statue of a now-obscure lithographer named Gavarni, also famous in his day. Locals sifted through bric-a-brac at a tumbledown shop that advertised
antiquités et curiosités
—yard-sale castoffs and oddments rescued from attics and cellars. The neighborhood was quiet, with a few small public gardens flanked by tidy, uninteresting streets. The red-light district of Zola’s day apparently had split in two, shifting north to Pigalle and south to Les Halles.

I decided to backtrack to Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and have lunch at Chartier, a workingman’s restaurant in business since Moreau’s final days. Perhaps the painter had been a habitué, I fantasized. Given the elaborately decorative, eclectic nature of his work, Moreau surely would have liked the décor. Brass racks run over wooden booths. Customers eye each other in mirrored panels. In a single load waiters carry eight plates and three bottles of
vin de pays
(the menu warns that the management declines responsibility for stains caused by reckless servers).

It was here at Chartier, over pepper steak and a carafe of very ordinary red wine, that I read the catalogue cover to cover and began to learn the details of Moreau’s life and career. For some mysterious reason—possibly the death of his intimate friend Chassériau—Moreau stopped attending the salons of the Countess Greffulhe (later immortalized by Proust) and the Princess Mathilde, Emperor Napoléon III’s cousin. Over the years Moreau became, as the novelist and critic J. K. Huysmans wrote, “the mystic shut away in the center of Paris.” He was thought to be homosexual or bisexual. Highly secretive, only a handful of his friends knew of his twenty-five-year liaison with a certain Adélaide-Alexandrine Dureux, a “spiritual companion” whom he maintained in an apartment in Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.

Moreau was uncommunicative. Often he refused to explain the meaning of his hermetic artworks. To one collector who bought a picture and requested a written key to decipher it, Moreau replied that he had simply to “love to dream.” Zola, reviewing Moreau’s pictures at a salon in the 1880s wrote, “He paints dreams … sophisticated, complicated, enigmatic dreams.”