Baxter - Montmartre: Pariss village of art and sin

CONTENTS

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Saint-Germain-des-Prs

Five Nights in Paris

Paris at the End of the World

The Perfect Meal

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World

Von Sternberg

Carnal Knowledge

Immoveable Feast

Well Always Have Paris

A Pound of Paper

Science Fiction in the Cinema

Buuel

Fellini

Stanley Kubrick

Steven Spielberg

Woody Allen

George Lucas

De Niro

TRANSLATED BY JOHN BAXTER

My Lady Opium by Claude Farrre

Morphine by Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest

The Diary of a Chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau

Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess by Alfred de Musset

MONTMARTRE. Copyright 2017 by John Baxter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Map by Tony Foster

ISBN 978-0-06-243189-9

EPub Edition April 2017 ISBN 9780062431929

For Marie-Dominique,

without whom...

Entrance to Cabaret of Hell, 1899. (Edouard Cucuel)

Map by Tony Foster

T HERE ARE CERTAIN MORNINGS IN EARLY SPRING WHEN women, on a whim, decide its the day to start going bare-legged or to wear a hat, while men loop a scarf around their neck and shake the creases out of the linen jacket stuffed in the back of the closet since September.

Jane came from somewhere in the Midwest. Each spring, France fills with women like her. They appear overnight, just as drifting dandelion seeds cover Europe in thistledown. Like those seeds, they follow wind and whim from London to Rome to Berlin to Paris, looking for something that Des Moines, Iowa, or Rapid City, South Dakota, doesnt providegirls of summer who, as Stephen Sondheim explains in his song of that name, may, in contracting a touch of the sun, also incur a touch of the moon.

In Paris, these lost ladies take a cooking course at Le Cordon Bleu, a refresher class in conversational French at the Alliance Franaise, attend readings at Shakespeare and Company or the American Library, even risk a flirtation with someone met in a caf. But if they are readers, they sign up for walking tours around the haunts of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and other expatriate writers.

This is where I meet them, since, for Anglophones who have made their lives here, the role of guide, interpreter, and someone I know in Paris comes with the territory.

Id agreed to show Jane and her traveling companion around the literary sites of Saint-Germain-des-Prs, but when we met that Sunday morning, she was alone.

My friend didnt feel up to it, she explained. He decided to stay at the hotel.

I could visualize the type; a little hungover, a little lazy, and not all that interested in writers he hoped hed left behind in American Literature 101.

Thats a pity, I said, glancing at the cloudless sky. The weathers perfect.

She looked wistful. Wed booked a tour of Montmartre yesterday, she said, but he said he couldnt face all those hills, so we didnt do that, either. Im really sorry to have missed it.

Well, I said, would you rather go to Montmartre today instead of Saint-Germain?

Oh, thats not necessary, she said, surprised.

Its no problem, I said. Saint-Germain has waited five centuries. Itll still be here when you want to see it.

So we took the bus up Boulevard Saint-Michel, and thirty minutes later, the funicular car carried us the last few hundred meters to the summit of Montmartre, the steep-sided 170-meter-high tableland on the northern edge of the city that Parisians call la butte.

The bulbous white domes of the Basilica of Sacr-Coeur loomed above us, reminding me, as usual, of a cluster of mushrooms. Grandiose rather than beautiful, thought one architectural historian, trying to be kind.

Hundreds of visitors were already sitting on the steps below the cathedral or leaning on the balustrade of the terrace that, like a box at the opera, offers an unrivaled panorama of the city. Some were simply enjoying the morning, others listening to Paraguayan harpist Hugo Barahona, as much a fixture of Montmartre as the caricaturists on Place du Tertre vying to draw your portrait.

Hed claimed his usual spot, on the steps below the promenade, facing away from the citya shrewd choice, since the whole of Paris provided him with an unsurpassable backdrop. He agreed with Gertrude Steins companion, Alice Toklas, who said, I like a good view, but I prefer to sit with my back to it.

The Basilica of Sacr-Coeur.

His harps metallic zither-like jangle, hinting at a tonal tradition remote from here, was one more element among the thousands that made up Montmartres unique personality. Here, even music has a touch of strange. As he paused between numbers, I dropped five euros into his basket and murmured a request.

In better weather, a few mute living statues, skin painted chalk-white, pose at the foot of the stairs leading up the church. One, standing on a plinth, his knees at our face level, wore the robe and laurel wreath of an Italian Renaissance scholar. Had he chosen to speak, the man might have explained that his outfit copied that worn by Dante as fellow poet Virgil led him on a tour of Hell in The Divine Comedy. Any such explanation, however, would have been a waste of time, since not many American colleges teach early Italian poetry (or poetry of any kind), and few visitors catch the reference.

I photographed the two together, the modern Dante unbending sufficiently to lift a marmoreal hand above Janes head in benediction. At that instant, Barahona began playing the tune Id requested, La Complainte de la Butte (The Lament of the Butte)the theme for the Jean Renoir film