The Invention of Paris (31 page)

Who was responsible for transforming a Montparnasse of rustic dance halls into a place that would shake up the old world, between the years of symbolism and August 1914? For André Salmon:

Paul Fort, the master of the Closeries and sustainer of its memorable games . . . was the real creator of modern Montparnasse . . . He listed to me, in a rush of names I could hardly keep up with, all the poets whose work had held the stage at the Gaîté-Montparnasse, and those whose enthusiasm led to heated brawls: Henri de Régnier, Jean Moréas, Émile Verhaeren, Vielé-Griffin, Stuart Merrill, Paul Claudel, Maurice Barrès, Saint-Pol-Roux-le-Magnifique, André Gide, Pierre Louÿs, just to stick with those who became contributors to the literary review
Vers et Prose
, founded by Paul Fort in 1905 at the heart of Montparnasse: 18 Rue Boissonard.

This street was more recent than its parallel, Rue Campagne-Première. To quote Ramuz:

Rue Boissonnade, however, had a great intimacy. It was largely inhabited by painters, gentlemen and ladies who came from all parts of the world, but especially from Russia, and there is still a certain cosmopolitan Paris of which Montparnasse is one of the centres. This cul-de-sac also housed a working-class population employed in a large printing house, and a number of quiet households of retired people or pensioners.
¹¹³

Apollinaire gave birth to Montparnasse; he was the first to take us to Baty's and was fêted everywhere. As soon as he spoke, Guillaume gave a voice to the crowd of poets and painters who, when they listened to him, believed that they heard themselves, and read his words as addressed to them. Before you could notice, adjacent to his cousin Paul Fort whose domain included the long
boul' Mich'
, Bullier, the Luxembourg and the Closerie des Lilas, he traced the boundaries of his own fiefdom, and, from the café of Les Deux-Magots where Jarry had once decorated
him with the order of the Grande Gidouille, extended this via Rue de Rennes and Boulevard Raspail through to the point where this boulevard crosses with that of Montparnasse. Had he not already sent his scouts out towards Plaisance, where Douanier Rousseau lived, and made his headquarters for a while in the friendly Rue de la Gaîté?
¹¹⁴

In 1913, Apollinaire described Montparnasse in the following prophetic fashion:

Montparnasse has replaced Montmartre, the Montmartre of another age, that of artists, singers, windmills and taverns . . . All those expelled for riotous living from the old Montmartre, destroyed by property owners and architects . . . have emigrated in the guise of Cubists, Peaux-Rouges, or Orphic poets. Their loud voices have disturbed the echoes of the crossroads of the Grande-Chaumière. Outside a café established in a house of licentious memory, they set up a redoubtable competitor, the Café de la Rotonde. The Germans were just opposite. The Slavs were keener to come in. The Jews went indifferently from one to the other . . . Let us start by sketching the physiognomy of the crossroads. It will in all likelihood change very soon. At one of the corners of Boulevard Montparnasse a large grocer displays to the eyes of a whole crowd of international artists his enigmatic name ‘Hazard' . . . Here on the other corner is the Rotonde . . . André Salmon sometimes stops on this terrace, distant like a spectator at the back of a theatre box; Max Jacob is often there, selling his
Côte
and his drawings, sometimes even the long and serene figure of Charles Morice can be seen against the wall inside. At one corner of Boulevard Montparnasse and Rue Delambre is the Dôme: a clientele of regulars, rich people, aesthetes from Massachussets or the banks of the Spree . . . On another corner is Baty or the last wineshop. When he retires, this profession will have all but disappeared in Paris . . . Soon, I would wager, without wishing it, Montparnasse will have its nightclubs and its songsters, as it has its painters and its poets. The day when the songs of someone like Bruant celebrate the different corners of this quarter full of imagination, its creameries, the workshop-barracks of Rue Campagne-Première, the extraordinary dairy-cum-grillroom on Boulevard du Montparnasse, the Chinese restaurant, Tuesdays at the Closerie des Lilas – that day Montparnasse will have given up the ghost.
¹¹⁵

It is true that after 1914 Montparnasse never regained this grace and innocence, despite Modigliani, despite Pascin's bowler hat, despite Kiki, Picasso and Joyce, Brassaï and Man Ray – everything has been said, after all, on the 1920s. But anyone who has experienced the destruction of a quarter as a result of its success can understand why, in 1924, Breton and Aragon, ‘out of hatred of Montparnasse and Montmartre', decided, as we have seen, to establish their headquarters in a district long out of fashion, at the Café Certa in the Passage de l'Opéra.

Yet Montparnasse had its final moment in the 1950s, when it was no longer fashionable and not yet ravaged. The cafés there were quite gloomy, and their floors strewn with cigarette butts even in the mornings. The only two cinemas were the Studio Raspail in its magnificent modernistic building, and the Studio Parnasse on Rue Jules-Chaplain, where on Tuesday evenings after the last showing the owners asked impossible questions and cineastes could win free tickets. Writers and artists still lived in the quarter and quietly got on with their work. Once on the same morning I happened to pass Sartre in Rue d'Odessa and Giacometti who was coming out of the Raspail-Vert. Each of them was alone, small, badly dressed; they walked just like anyone else – or almost so, since Giacometti limped a bit, as is well-known.

Even today, if you avoid the Dôme, which should never have been allowed to call itself the café of Trotsky and Kertész, the Coupole that is now part of a chain of eateries, and the Closerie with its ex-Maoist
balladuriens
, Montparnasse has preserved its attractions (writing this word, I suddenly remember
Andromaque
: ‘. . . and the fate of Orestes/Is to never cease loving your attractions/And to always swear that this will never end', a verse that matches very well my feeling for the quarter of my childhood). Everyone is free to trace their own itinerary there, in architecture, art, or love, as they pass the Art Déco buildings on Rue Campagne-Première; the little workshop-houses with pointed roofs on Rue Boissonnade; the Cartier foundation with its ‘Look at me!' spirit that is not out of place in the quarter, and at least has the merit of having preserved Chateaubriand's cedar tree; the pretty rationalist building of the École Spéciale d'Architecture on the opposite side; the little gardens and studios at the top of Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs; the shaded courtyard of Reid Hall with its library, on Rue de Chevreuse; and the Tschann bookshop, ending up on the little triangular place formed between Rues Vavin and Bréa, overlooked by the hanging garden that belonged to Matisse's paint supplier, and by the white-and-blue-porcelain steps of the Sauvage building.

Among the countless anonymous triangles that are formed in this way by the convergence of two streets, this is one of my favourites, along with one
at the other end of Paris, which the junction of Rue Jean-Pierre-Timbaud and Rue des Trois-Couronnes makes with Rue Morand, the site of the Maison des Métallos and a mosque, where children play under the catalpa trees around a curious variant of Rodin's
Thinker
. It is undoubtedly such places that Walter Benjamin had in mind in
The Arcades Project
when he evoked

the little timeless squares that suddenly are there, and to which no name attaches. They have not been the object of careful planning, like the Place Vendôme or the Place de Grève, and do not enjoy the patronage of world history, but owe their existence to houses that have slowly, sleepily, belatedly assembled in response to the summons of the century. In such squares, the trees hold sway; even the smallest afford thick shade. Later, however, in the gaslight, their leaves have the appearance of dark-green frosted glass near the street lamps, and their earliest green glow at dusk is the automatic signal for the start of spring in the big city.
¹¹⁶

 

1
Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
.

2
‘It is Lavoisier, of the Academy of Sciences, to whom we owe these heavy and useless barriers, a new oppression exercised by the contractors over their fellow citizens. But alas, this great physicist Lavoisier was a Farmer-General' (Sébastien Mercier,
Le Nouveau Paris
, 10 Frimaire, year VII/1798). The Ferme-Générale was a private tax administration. Its offices were venal, and the receipts divided between the city of Paris, the royal Treasury, and the Farmers themselves. The Constituent Assembly suppressed the
octroi
in 1790, but it was re-established by the Directory.

3
On the other hand, those who lived inside the zone subject to
octroi
were exempt from one of the other major taxes of the ancien régime, the
taille
.

4
The diary of Hardy, Paris bookseller (BN, ms. Fr. 6685), Thursday, 21 October 1784. Cited by B. Rouleau,
Villages et faubourgs de l'ancien Paris
.
Histoire d'un espace urbain
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1985).

5
Victor Marouk,
Juin 1848
(Paris, 1880; republished Paris: Spartacus, 1998).

6
Émile Zola,
L'Assommoir
. The Rochechouart slaughterhouse was situated where the Lycée Jacques-Decour and the Square d'Anvers now stand. It was one of a series of slaughterhouses built under the First Empire: those of Grenelle, between Avenues de Saxe and de Breteuil, Popincourt (Square Maurice-Gardette, on Avenue Parmentier), Roule, on Avenue de Messine, and l'Hôpital, between Boulevards de l'Hôpital and de la Gare (Pinon,
Paris, biographie d'une capitale
).

7
On the Left Bank it follows Boulevards Vincent-Auriol, Blanqui, Saint-Jacques, Raspail, Edgar-Quinet, Vaugirard, Pasteur, Garibaldi and Grenelle. On the Right Bank, from the Trocadéro it follows Avenue Kléber, Avenue de Wagram, and the Boulevards Courcelles, Batignolles, Clichy, Rochechouart, La Chapelle, La Villette, Belleville, Ménilmontant, Charonne, Picpus, Reuilly and Bercy.

8
Ledoux,
L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art.

9
Béraud and Dufay,
Dictionnaire historique de Paris
(Paris, 1832). This reentrant angle is still very clear, at the end of Rue des Martyrs.

10
Pinon noted that ‘the moment of its completion corresponded with the sale of national properties [confiscated by the Revolution], which saturated the market for land and buildings within the city for many years, or even decades' (
Paris, biographie d'une capitale
).

11
Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
; cf. also Honoré de Balzac,
Cousine Bette
(1846).

12
Balzac,
Ferragus
; Baudelaire, ‘Dawn',
Les Fleurs du mal
. Baudelaire had an admiration for Balzac that he did not genuinely feel for any other contemporary French writer. ‘Balzac, the prodigious meteor that will cover our country with a cloud of glory, like a bizarre and exceptional sunrise, an aurora borealis flooding the icy desert with its fairy light' (‘
Madame Bovary
par Gustave Flaubert', published in
L'Artiste
, 18 October 1857). And again: ‘Honoré de Balzac, you the most heroic, the most extraordinary, the most romantic and the most poetic of all the characters that you have produced from your womb' (‘The Salon of 1846. Heroism of Modern Life', in Charles Baudelaire,
The Mirror of Art
[London: Phaidon, 1955], p. 130).

13
The 1
^st
arrondissement corresponded to the Champs-Élysées and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; the 2
^nd
to the Palais-Royal and the Chaussée-d'Antin; the 3
^rd
to the Faubourgs Poissonière and Montmartre; the 4
^th
to the Louvre and Les Halles; the 5
^th
to the Faubourg Saint-Denis and the Sentier; the 6
^th
to the Arts et Métiers and the Temple; the 7
^th
to the Marais; the 8
^th
to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Quartier Popincourt; the 9
^th
to the two Îles; the 10
^th
to the Faubourg Saint-Germain; the 11
^th
to the Latin Quarter; the 12
^th
to the Faubourgs Saint-Jacques and Saint-Marceau. Out of these twelve arrondissements, only three were on the Left Bank.

14
Cited by Jeanne Pronteau,
Les Numérotages des rues de Paris du XVe siècle à nos jours
(Paris: Commission des travaux historiques, 1966), an impressive work which I have borrowed from in the following pages.

15
Only the part of the present faubourg between the Porte Saint-Honoré – at the level with Rue Royale – and the site of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule was actually known as the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Beyond this, and up to the Roule barrier – the site today of the Place des Ternes – was the Faubourg du Roule.

16
Sauval,
Histoire et recherches
.

17
Hurtaut and Magny,
Dictionnaire historique
. In texts of this time, the term ‘Étoile' denoted either the present Étoile (as it was from the late eighteenth century), or else the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, sometimes called the ‘Étoile des Champs-Élysées'. In the present text, I believe it is the Rond-Point. In actual fact, the avenues of the Champs-Élysées gardens did not extend above the Allée des Veuves (now Avenue Montaigne), so that it was impossible that they ‘ended up in the form of a star' at the present Place de l'Étoile. In the same way, the ‘height' that was razed by the Marquis de Marigny was more likely a small hill on the side of the Rond-Point rather than the large prominence on which the Arc de Triomphe was later constructed.