Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (39 page)

Here’s something else I’ve deduced: whether you have prurient inclinations or not, noctambulism inevitably induces voyeurism. Outside, in the dark, you can’t help peering up at the apartments, into countless doll’s-house tableaux enacted nightly, seemingly for your delectation. Exhibitionism may be part of the equation. Parisians are often unself-conscious and I sometimes wonder if they get a thrill by
not
drawing the curtains.

Beyond the Île Saint-Louis and its mansions, the most exquisite doll’s houses I know for nighttime viewing are found on and near Place des Vosges, centerpiece of the Right Bank’s Marais neighborhood. The square’s thirty-six identical pavilions—all built in the first two decades of the 1600s—offer remarkable architectural detailing, and a chance to indulge your curiosity. There are bull’s-eye windows in the slanting slate roofs, plus arcades and ceilings with painted timbers. At times, the back-lighting reveals the fabulous art collections of famous auctioneers and the rich families who’ve lived there for decades or centuries.

When the window-shopping culture-vultures who cruise the Marais by day bed down for the night, and the trendies cluster along Rue Vieille-du-Temple and Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, many of the area’s quiet residential streets provide endless permutations for the intrepid
noctambule
. A head looms in an arrow-slit window on a tower jutting over Rue Saint-Paul. Curtains flap in a ghostly old building—until recently a squat—in Rue Pastourelle. A flash system pops and models pose in a third-floor apartment in Rue de Turenne, where a fashion photographer works into the night. Mystery awaits around every corner.

The Palais-Royal is another nocturnal treat, its long, moodily lit arcades physically unchanged since the days of Restif de la Bretonne (though what you now hear echoing are not the clogs of prostitutes or the boots of assassins, but the taps of the well-heeled tripping home from fancy restaurants like Michelin-starred Le Grand Véfour). The ghosts of Jean Cocteau and Colette flit among the perfectly aligned rows of rectangular linden trees, up and over the balconies with their giant urns and slate roofs pierced by wide-screen skylights.

One of my favorite night circuits wends from the Palais-Royal via the colonnaded Bourse (the stock exchange), through ill-lit passageways and alleys to Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, whose hollow-eyed façades look like craggy cliff dwellings. The road changes names as it mounts in an arc past the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette—homely by day, almost pretty by night—and Place Blanche to the famous hill crowned by the marvelously obscene Sacré-Coeur basilica.

Over the centuries many French and foreign writers have contributed to the literature of noctambulism. In the 1920s and ’30s, Louis-Férdinand Céline (
Voyage au Bout de la Nuit
) trotted obsessively to and fro between Paris and the suburb near Levallois where he lived, ruminating on the horrors of contemporary society. When he wasn’t searching for outdoor urinals or gazing at his navel, Henry Miller was taking (or describing) his so-called “obsessional walks”—a kind of revelatory nighttime ramble—around Place de Clichy and Montmartre, under the night-lit silhouette of Sacré-Coeur and its “savage teat” cupolas.

When I walk around Montmartre I can’t help thinking of Amedeo Modigliani, nicknamed “Modi,” which sounds like
maudit
and means, in French, “cursed” or “luckless.” Modi may never have written about the night himself—he used his pencil for other endeavors—but his lustful wanderings are the subject of many a biography. It seems that if the perpetually thirsty and penniless genius couldn’t be found painting or sculpting in one of the Montmartre hovels he occupied, he was usually leaping from bed to bed, or mooching a drink in Place du Tertre.

This square and the streets fronting nearby Sacré-Coeur are a zoo from dawn to past midnight, and if you’re into high kitsch then be my guest. In the dead of night, though, they emanate a hauntingly beautiful sadness. Nearby roads like Rue des Saules and Rue Saint-Vincent, instead, wrap around the back of the hill to a small vineyard. I like to wander there and down the arm-span-wide Allée des Brouillards—Fog Alley—which crosses an area once called Le Maquis, a no-man’s-land filled with ramshackle huts and studios. At night you can still spot the occasional artist’s atelier in this eminently desirable neighborhood, illuminated from within, or catch keyhole views of the city from streets that tilt and turn, like Rue Lepic. About a decade ago Paris’s lighting engineers began transforming a series of Montmartre outdoor stairways into “light sculptures,” a new expression of environmental art that taps into the enchantments of the night and helps keep tired tourists from tripping in the dark.

Cost-free, nonpolluting, and surprisingly safe, the best thing about noctambulism in Paris is its inexhaustible variety. Another walk that fills me with wonder follows the curving Canal Saint-Martin from the Seine, along Boulevard Richard Lenoir, all the way to La Villette and the beltway edging town. On cobbled sidewalks under towering plane trees you pass the Hôtel du Nord (
Atmosphère! Atmosphère!
), drawbridges, mossy locks, and the circular La Rotonde customs house designed in 1789 by visionary architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Or wander around Belleville, an unsung neighborhood in the 19th and 20th arrondissements, with unexpected views from the Parc de Belleville and plenty of un-gentrified urban edge.

When in the mood for tamer surroundings, I walk from the 24/7 cafés of Montparnasse across sleeping Saint-Germain-des-Prés to Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité, then onward to the mossy Marais. Or I ride out to Passy in the posh 16th arrondissement to loop around hilly Rue de l’Alboni lined by towering Art Déco buildings. Afterward I follow watery Rue des Eaux, Avenue Marcel Proust and Rue Raynouard, to see how the richest one percent lives. Emerging from Rue Benjamin Franklin and the spotlit monument to that lusty old American revolutionary, I’m unfailingly enchanted by the view from Trocadéro of the Seine and the sparkling Eiffel Tower. But my favorite night-walk will always remain that slow, meditative troll around the Île Saint-Louis, guided by the words of Restif de la Bretonne and Baudelaire, and the lights of the
bateaux-mouches
.

Grave Situations

Naître, mourir, renaître encore, et progresse sans cesse telle est la loi
. (To be born, die, be reborn again, and thereby progress unceasingly, such is the law.)

—Inscription on the tomb of Allan Kardec at Père-Lachaise cemetery

he potatoes atop the tomb of Auguste Parmentier at Père-Lachaise cemetery appeared to be staring with greenish potato eyes at passersby. It wasn’t the first time the spuds had been piled there.

A hundred yards away, in Division 92, near the crematorium, a prim woman glanced nervously around before surreptitiously stroking the lumpy pants of long-dead Victor Noir, his prodigious parts already polished by many hands. Another hundred yards east, a teenage boy applied pink lipstick to his lips, puckered, and kissed the tomb of Oscar Wilde.

North of the crematorium’s smokestack, a man with leather patches on his jacket leaned over Marcel Proust’s gravestone. He tore a page from
Swann’s Way
, recited lines from memory, like a prayer, then slipped the page under crossed twigs left by someone else.

My office used to be a one-minute walk from Père-Lachaise, a quiet refuge of looping lanes on hillsides in eastern Paris, and for twenty years I was a habitué. During those years I never quite got it: Why the potatoes, torn pages, strokes, and kisses? Then one day the penny dropped. Parmentier, an agronomist, buried in a neoclassical tomb in Division 39, taught Europe to grow potatoes, and by the early 1800s his efforts had largely eliminated famine. Farmers, botanists, or chefs, perhaps, were still sending him thanks, two centuries later.

Victor Noir, a youth killed dueling in 1870 with Prince Pierre Bonaparte—Emperor Napoleon III’s cousin—had been immortalized in bronze with startling realism. Few knew that Noir had been a journalist and politician aged a mere twenty-two when he died, or that his funeral drew one hundred thousand mourners. It wasn’t his history but his anatomy that mattered. For the last 140-odd years his manliness has been a cure-all among believers for infertility and impotence. Daily, dozens of barren women and men not even Viagra can help caress evergreen Victor Noir.

As to Wilde’s kisses and Proust’s pages, the adolescent boy, like the tweedy reader, obviously intended to give thanks to a trailblazer, recognize artistic genius, and also commune with Oscar and Marcel. That was the key to understanding one of the stranger Paris phenomena: communing with the dead.

Hundreds of the tombs of France’s great and good draw millions of busily curious visitors. They leave flowers and take photos, saluting Chopin, Colette, or Baron Haussmann. But it’s the graves of several score dead men and women—some unknown to the general public—that are pilgrimage sites, summoning acolytes to the city’s three main cemeteries. Stranger still, many of those leaving messages or tokens, or taking away souvenirs, seem perfectly normal. They are professors and ballerinas, musicians, philosophers and teachers, not to mention butchers, bakers, and cell phone makers.

The bestselling novel and subsequent movie
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
may have made Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery famous overnight. But few other places outside Paris draw so many grave pilgrims bent on communion with lost souls. In this, as in other realms, the city stands out. Not long ago I decided to try to discover why, and make a short list of cultish tombs at Père-Lachaise, Montparnasse, and Montmartre.

A first stop for many is Jim Morrison, long a star attraction at Père-Lachaise. To me, the graffiti-scrawled enclave, littered with whisky bottles, surrounded by riot-control fencing, and often guarded by police, is less compelling than the graveyard’s other shrines. From the 1970s to ’90s, Morrison fans snuck in after closing time to hold druggie vigils or orgies, and one of them stole his bust. Nowadays the grave attracts mainstream visitors who’ve seen the movie. The passion and conviction are gone, perhaps for the better. Ditto Edith Piaf, whose tomb in Division 97 was long visited by fans of the singer. It’s been mobbed since the biographical movie
La Vie en Rose
came out in early 2007, and the spot’s gentle magic is gone.

One wet morning recently, after paying tribute to Parmentier, Noir, Wilde, and Proust, I headed to Allan Kardec’s sepulcher, a neo-dolmen-menhir in Division 44. Fred Flintstone would have approved. For obscure reasons, the pre-Celtic peoples of Europe erected dolmens—flat fieldstones propped up by rocks—or upright menhirs. Perhaps, I thought, the Father of Spiritism wished to commune with his nameless ancestors.

Kardec lived from 1804 to 1869. Photographs show a portly sharper, but the bronze bust in the shrine evokes an intense quester. Kardec’s real name was Hippolyte Léon Denisart-Rivail, and his Spiritist creed gleaned timeless secrets through conversations with ghosts. It’s claimed Arthur Conan Doyle and Victor Hugo were secret admirers. Kardec’s adepts believe to this day that spirits live and can be reached via mediums. Inscribed on the tomb is the device:
Naître, mourir, renaître encore, et progresse sans cesse telle est la loi
.

The belief in eternal rebirth explains why believers who encircle or touch the holy site, amid cascades of fresh flowers, often appear to be speaking. Their lips and eyelids move. So many of them lean against the dolmen—the cemetery’s most-visited grave—that posted notices discourage the practice. One day the shrine may topple, doubtless to be rebuilt again. And again.

Intrepid Spiritists know the addresses of Kardec’s successors. Shadow an adept like a gumshoe, as I did, and you might find yourself at the lesser dolmen of Pierre-Gaétan Leymarie, nearby in Division 70. He directed the journal
Spirite
, captured spirits photographically (charging twenty francs for six snapshots), and ran the Spiritism show after Kardec “dis-incarnated.” Once Leymarie had also dis-incarnated, Gabriel Delanne (1857–1926) stepped in. His mortal coil reposes in Division 44. The tomb is banal, but perpetually covered with flowers, and often is encircled by silent Spiritists.