envoi

28/29  November

                "Car c'est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur témoignage

 Que nous puissions donner de notre dignité

    Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'âge en âge

 Et vient mourir au bord de votre éternité!"

                 --lines from Baudelaire's "Les Phares" inscribed on his                            statue in the Luxembourg gardens

It was really thanks to my friend Steve that I got back to Baudelaire. I had brought along a cheap copy of "Les fleurs du mal," but hadn't spent much time with it. But the text Steve sent me of Roy Campbell's lurid and convincing translation of "Au Lecteur" got me going, and I've been pulling out my little paperback late at night, on the métro, waiting in ticket lines, even lying in bed first thing in the morning. It becomes atmospheric, that world peopled by demons and saturated with a powerful nostalgia for what never existed except in the imagination. 

I also gradually began to take special notice of this statue of Baudelaire as I ran around the Luxembourg gardens. I hadn't noticed him at all the first few times--I was getting my second wind at that point, not sight-seeing--but now I make a point of greeting him, and he me. I take photos of the statue when I walk past it--I have an extensive, all-weather set. I also drop by his grave now and then, here in Montparnasse, and that single faded red rose on his tombstone is the one I put there. 

I had never paid much attention to his poem "Les Phares"--"The Beacons"--but I went back to it after I found its final quatrain inscribed on the base of his statue. In it the poet makes a strange and uncanny visit to his art museum of the mind, starting with the "amnesiac river" that is "Rubens" ("Rubens, fleuve d'oubli"), and continuing on through singular descriptions of Rembrandt, Leonardo, Goya. Eventually he arrives at "Delacroix, bloody lake haunted by evil angels" ("lac de sang hanté des mauvais anges"). I have to admit that I don't for the most part recognize these Old Masters in his phrases. Perhaps scholarship could help me, but I doubt it. These are paintings as seen by the poet and no one else--a visionary gallery. Not even paintings, they are signals, pointing outward, sounding the alarm, or drawing us back, if like the "hunters" he goes on to mention, we should lose our way. 

I don't exactly identify with these iconic figures from art history, either in Baudelaire's poet's vision of them, or my own. But at the end of the poem they become generalized into the outcry of "a thousand sentinels," or better yet, "a thousand loud-speakers" ("porte-voix," if you'll pardon the anachronism). Here I begin to see myself: could I be one of these loud-speakers, these "signal-fires lit in a thousand citadels"? Not that I could claim the singularity of vision the poet ascribes to his artist-beacons, or by implication to himself. But I do hope that these scattered observations of a place, Montparnasse, of Paris, and of a movement to build a better, more equitable society, might like Baudelaire's phares "bear a higher witness," as the poet says, "to our human dignity." 

But for now it's au revoir to all that, or better, à la prochaine.  

sortilège du coin

20 November

Ever since I arrived in Montparnasse, I have felt peculiarly drawn to the rue de la Gaîté. I don't know why. Perhaps its name: a street that promises gayety is not to be bypassed. Or its history: in the pleasure days of the 19th century this was a spot where Parisians came for, well, gayety, for dance, drink, and amour. In the last century these pleasures evolved into music halls and burlesque theaters, most famously Bobino, where Piaf sang and Chevalier got his start. Now interspersed with peep shows, the street remains nonetheless a theater district, a miniature Times Square full of show crowds, neon, and the buzz of cafés.

The other night I saw "Les Sortilèges de l'Amour" at the Comédie Italienne, surely the smallest theater on the rue de la Gaîté, where for the price of a ticket I bought a potent dose of magic. Just buying the tickets was an experience. Pushing open the little swinging door that separates theater from street I entered a darkened lobby hung with masques and costumes, where a voice from nowhere greeted me. Eventually I located a spotlit desk at the far end, where I met Attilio Maggiulli, co-founder of the Comédie, adapter/translator/director of "Les Sortilèges," ... and ticket-seller on this slow afternoon. Signor Maggiulli, Italian by birth, has dedicated much of his long career to bringing Commedia dell'Arte to France, studying with the eminent Giorgio Strehler in Milan, collaborating with Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theâtre du Soleil as well as the Comédie Française, and launching his Teatrino Italiano in Montparnasse in 1974. He moved to his present location, the former site of a police commisariat, in 1980, and expanded next door in 1991, replacing a sex shop (more on hybridization in a moment). Famous for his revivals of the Italian Baroque, he has also created an adaptation of Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks," and more recently, as a sequel to his "George W. Bush ou le triste Cow-Boy de Dieu" (2003),  he performed his piece called "Guantanamo Palace" in San Francisco. Told I came from Boston, his eyes lit up: "Ah, le North-End ...."    

"Les Sortilèges de l'Amour" is steeped in metamorphosis from the moment the narrator steps on-stage, wearing a parrot-mask, and delivers his prologue with little bird-coos separating the phrases. Each character in turn has such a hybrid identity: the King, a bull-dog, punctuates his speech with little barks; the ingenue Clarice not only wears a mosquito-nose and brandishes a rapier but buzzes around the stage en pointe while her exasperated father chases her with an old-fashioned bug-sprayer. The lovely Angela, played by Maggiulli's co-founder and companion Hélène Lestrade, alternates between a feminine voice of exquisite softness, and little lamb-noises that become a second lexicon of devotion.

In fact every element in this play of marvels is apt to transform into something else. The actors all play three or four parts, changing masks and costumes with a sort of mad glee. The court of faraway China becomes an enchanted forest when a set of enormous but delicate Chinese fans are folded out to make it one. Of course there is a magic spell that turns the King into a Beggar, the evil Minister into the King, the Beggar into a Cerf (deer), and even the Cerf almost becomes a Cerf-volant (kite). The play itself is a strange cross-fertilization of works by Goldoni and Gozzi, contemporaries and bitter rivals whose involuntary collaboration in "Sortilèges" is a theatrical inside-joke.

But the greatest metamorphosis is the one the viewer experiences stepping into Maggiulli's miniature world. The theater itself, with no more than fifty seats, is like a jewelry case lined with deep red plush. When the narrator pushes open the curtain, he reveals a small stage whose every surface is adorned with little decorative emblems--pictures, bits of glitter, hanging things-- suggestive of someplace faraway. Maggiulli's characters speak in an antique French that retains the inflations of court-Italian, though they lapse as well into speech rhythms--"Permesso?" " Avanti!"--more suited to a present-day trattoria. Likewise the magic curtain--what Maggiulli calls his féerie--parts to admit sly references to François Fillon (France's evil Prime Minister) and Carla Bruni (its balladeer First Lady). But for the most part we are swept along in the currents of the fabulous, so that when the actors remove their masks at the second curtain call, their reinsertion into the everyday is a more outrageous travesty than the play itself.

À quoi sert la Tour Eiffel?

À encadrer la Tour Montparnasse, évidement.

tour de Montparnasse

13 November

One of the great Parisian traditions is the ritual of the visite guidée. Half a dozen perfect strangers, consulting their Officiel des spectacles, show up at a designated exit from some métro station, perhaps greeting each other shyly, perhaps not even. Then a scholar arrives to lead them on a walking seminar around the quartier, discoursing on its history, its anecdotes and notable inhabitants, its architecture and public art. Instant liberal arts education, bonus points for exercise, and a lesson in spoken French, all for 10 euros.

When I lived in Paris 26 years ago the visites were a favorite of mine for all these reasons, and I went on enough to know which guides--there were then about a dozen regulars--were more substantive and which were fluff. First place in the former category was an intense little man named Pierre-Yves Jaslet, who looked and talked like a perpetual graduate student, and I saw pas mal de choses in his company. 

 The other day I picked up my Officiel, and found a triple surprise: Jaslet was still giving tours all these years later, I remembered his name beyond a doubt, and he has added Montparnasse to his repertoire. This was all too good to ignore, so last Monday at precisely 10:30 Debra and I found ourselves in front of métro Vavin, sortie blvd. Montparnasse, côté impair, looking about expectantly. Sure enough I recognized him as he came huffing up a little late, Jaslet himself, a little heavier, same intense black-framed glasses, maybe even the same red silk ascot, still in need of a wash and badly tied. 

We began--a little group of eight--by crossing the street and walking straight into the Coupole, the art deco cafe-restaurant whose grand opening at the end of 1927 signaled both the high water mark and the final movement of Montparnasse's golden age. Jaslet warmly greeted the maître-d' before walking us around the palatial dining room, pointing out the columns individually painted by a roster of well-known artists of the era--but not, he tells us, the artists you associate with the 20's, not the cubists and surrealists. This is a more representative collection.  

From the Coupole we begin working the rue Delambre. Jaslet pulls rumpled papers from his pocket with scraps of information and the codes for street doors so we can enter the courtyards. In this one a series of artists, including the famous model Kiki of Montparnasse, had their studios starting in 1909. This other one has a tall doorway so that farm-wagons loaded with hay could enter: it was a breton dairy, where cows were kept and fresh milk sold, even at the start of the 20th century. But don't raise your voices in the courtyard--the woman who lives upstairs suffers from Tourette's syndrome and has been known to throw buckets of water down on the visitors.  We maintain an awed silence, but the half-timbered construction and exterior wooden staircase speak for themselves--nothing on the street shows this sort of age.

And so we go. At the end of Delambre we stop for a little talk about the progressive walling of Paris. The boulevard Edgar-Quinet, where we stand, marked a fortification less military than fiscal: under the ancien régime tariffs were collected on goods entering the city, and much smuggling took place over the wall, now the site of market stalls. Outside the wall was a free zone, a lieu de plaisance for students from the Latin Quarter since at least the 17th century. It was they who named it 'Parnassus,' the mountain of the Muses, in honor of their own creative leisures. In passing Jaslet notes the balcony of the apartment where Sartre passed his final years, just a few blocks from the studio of de Beauvoir. Another doorway leads to the room where André Breton wrote one of the Surrealist Manifestos--Jaslet can't remember which one, but gives us a short lecture on Breton's exposure to psychotic formations during the Great War, when he was in psychiatric training, and the relation between the Freudian unconscious and the fantaisiste realism of the surrealists. 

Gradually this little grid of streets, familiar to me for its shops, turns into a hive of interconnections over time and space. We enter more courtyards, some older than the quartier as such. We hear about the urbanist impulses of the incipient Vth Republic, which left the Tour Montparnasse to hover like Modernity itself over the once-bucolic environs of the Gaîté. And about the cultural politics of Jack Lang and the Socialists, which would explain the placement in the little public garden of that lovely proletarian sculpture by a Franco-Lithuanian sculptor whose name I've forgotten. (I should have taken notes.) We hear about more artists, more groups of artists, and --yes--the expatriate American writers, whose real café, we learn, the apex of literary snobisme,  was the Select, across the street from where our visit ends.

If the name Jaslet stayed in my memory for all those years, even now when I have trouble remembering my own, it must be because his profession has always fascinated me. A really good visite requires a rare intensity of knowledge, ranging across many disciplines but homing in on an area just a few blocks square. With that clarity of context and intention the sometimes dilettantish pursuits of cultural history become as precise and applied as engineering. After two hours with Jaslet the back streets of Montparnasse have changed for me forever; they echo as I walk them, and their closed doors open onto a dozen secluded vistas. If education, as its roots suggest, is a leading out, then an educator might have much to learn from a guide de visite.

street-singer

25 October

The outdoor market near my quartier,  the Edgar- Quinet,  happens twice a week.  On Wednesdays I go there because I'm hungry, but on Saturdays I try to work up a hunger just so I can go and hear the street-singer. He is quite a performer, with his traditional costume and his high, almost operatic baritone, and he positively preens for the many like me who take his picture. His repertoire, cranked out on a wonderful old hurdy-gurdy machine, includes all the old bal musette standards. Grandmothers often pause so their young charges can breathe in this air of an older Paris as it blows past. I don't recognize the tune he is playing when I enter the market this morning, but as I make my way down the stalls I hear 6, 8, a dozen mostly older folks still singing the tune long after the sound of the hurdy-gurdy has faded away.  

book-seller

25 October

There are several bookstores just around the corner on the boulevard Montparnasse, including one that sets out a charming rack of antiquities, but the moment I saw Tschann Libraire I knew I had found the real thing: notices for meet-the-author events and other book news taped all over the door, a steady flow of serious-looking customers in and out, and BOOKS, lots of them, ranked ceiling to floor on every square meter of wall space with more piled on tables and desks. When I mentioned to Mme. la libraire that I wanted to read about the literary and cultural legacy of the quartier she gave me a sharp look, as if to determine how serious I was, marched over to one of the dense shelves, pulled down a small armload of books, and handed them to me. Then she directed me to her own swivel chair and suggested I take a look at them "in tranquility." Now that's a bookstore!

Among the volumes was a vast, 600-plus-page edition of the memoirs of André Salmon, a writer I had never heard of. Salmon was a poet, novelist, and art critic who lived just around the corner from where I am now through the golden Montparnassian decades of the '10's, 20's, and '30's, before decamping for the south of France, where he lived and wrote for another 30 years. As a young man he had been part of the Montmartre crowd, but in 1909 he joined the migration of artists from the one butte to its crosstown rival. In explanation he cites the adage, "Open a school, you close a prison," and elaborates: "Open a night club, you close an artist's workshop, and ten poets disappear." A succinct history of the decline of Montmartre.

Luckily for me, Salmon also published a shorter volume just about Montparnasse, and that's the book I walked out with and am deeply immersed in at this moment. Salmon is a challenging stylist, a bit like Proust in his attachment to a rarefied vocabulary and long, twisting sentences, but he is also (like Proust) a genial and pungent observer.

To give you a little sense of Salmon, and to give myself a little translating work-out, I am appending a short passage from his boyhood recollections (editorial suggestions and corrections welcomed):

[...] ça descendait, au clair de lune et en bande, bras-dessus, bras-dessous, la rue de la Gaîté pleine des attraits d'une rue chinoise, parfumée de friture, arrosée de lumières violentes charriées par les ruisseaux. Nos drôles bramaient, feulaient selon les temperaments variables d'une unique nature, leur hymne provocateur, cynique et fier, orgeuilleux et patibulaire: 

Faut qu' ça pète ou qu' ça casse,

V'là les gars de Montparnasse;

Ils sont tous rigolos;

Viv'nt les gars de Montparno!

                                                           ("Montparnasse," p. 9)

[... this rowdy bunch] strolled arm-in-arm under a full moon down the rue de la Gaîté, as full of attractions as any street in China, perfumed with the smell of deep-frying and washed with violent flashes of light that shone in the streaming gutters.  Some of our jokers bellowed out, while others growled, according to their particular variations on a single personality, their provocative anthem, proud and  cynical, felonious and bold:

Look out for that fart, it'll bust your ass,

'Cuz we're the guys from Montparnasse;

With this bunch of clowns you never know;

So here's to the guys from Montparno!

Fun, hunh? I'll look for more bits to pass along as I go.

vavin

21 October

Where is Vavin? Before I even got to Montparnasse I saw the name on the plan du quartier: Vavin. It seemed to be the nearest métro station, but I couldn’t find it for the longest time. Found the street, but not the station. Then for a while I would lose the street, because where it crosses my street it forms a Y, and I’d get it mixed up with the rue Bréa, the left fork.  The rue Vavin is actually very small, and the métro station isn’t on it at all:  it’s on the Boulevard Montparnasse. That’s why I couldn’t find the station: I thought it was the Montparnasse station, until I realized that that station is further on, and much, much bigger. So from the start Vavin posed a lot of questions.

Even after I mastered the topology of Vavin, it has taken me some time to figure out its sociology. As you walk down the rue Notre-Dame des Champs, you pass almost nothing but schools and apartment buildings in close formation with few breaks in the façades until you reach the rue Vavin, where it opens up into a little square. The café Vavin, whose double rows of tables wrap around the corner as if it were on a boulevard and not just two small streets, is always noisy and full of young people no matter what time of day or night. Eventually I realized that for all the many students in the quartier, the Vavin is the logical hang-out, along with the bakery that turns into a sandwich shop at lunchtime, and the sidewalk itself, which can be impassable in the mid-afternoon. So that is one Vavin, a magnet for the young, but there are others.

A different crowd, a more sophisticated twenty-something crowd, permanently occupies the sidewalk in front of the Lucernaire, the avant-garde cinema and theatre complex at the bottom of the square. They stand around or sit at a handful of tables, and fill the whole street with clouds of smoke. Threading these sidewalk societies is a near-continuous line of mothers with carriages and small children in tow, on their way to or from the nursery and elementary schools up the street. They too leave their mark on Vavin: for the children a large toy-store fills the top of the square, while their mothers lend to the scene the poignancy of their faded beauty.

Across the square is another café with just a few tables and an older clientele, but even it lights up on Saturdays, when the little specialty butcher draws a long line of mères and grand-mères de famille, and middle-aged couples window-shop the boutiques that line the square and overflow down the rue Vavin. In the stone-paved center of the square a newsstand spreads its wares around a belle-époque fountain whose basin is supported by a foursome of gracefully draped naiads. These seem impervious to the constant circulation of motos around and sometimes (illegally) through the middle of the square, drowning out the din of conversation as they roar past.

It took me many trips through Vavin before I noticed all these features, like little compartments that opened for me one by one. I’m sure there are others that are still shut.

I have seen numerous references to a ‘carrefour Vavin,’ though no street sign bears that name. It is rather a virtual carrefour, a word which literally refers to the bifurcations (fourches) of four (quatre) paths, but anyone conversant with modern French can be forgiven for seeing in its name the image of a big square oven. I have seen other such squares tucked away in Paris’s residential neighborhoods, each one a small dream of urban design.  All sorts of things get cooked up in these places. But Vavin is special because of the way the plane trees overhanging the fountain give it the air of an oasis, because of the way its two Vs seem to mirror the Y-shape of its defining streets, the way its very name seems to rhyme with an even more intimate emblem of hospitality and enclosure. Vavin is special because if only for a short while it has become my little carrefour.

 

close encounters

17 October

My street, Notre-Dame des Champs, is long, narrow, crooked, and very old. As its name suggests, it dates to a time in the Middle Ages when it bordered the fields; likewise, more recently, the nearby Boulevard Montparnasse once marked the edge where country and city met. According to old guidebooks Parisians as late as the Second Empire would repair there of a Sunday for recreation and country air. The name of my café, the Bal Bullier, recalls one of the open-air dances that regularly took place here. At another of these lieux de plaisance, the Grande-Chaumière, just across the street from where I write these lines, in 1845 the Can-Can was invented. There ought to be a plaque.

I can't recall if it was Georg Simmel or Walter Benjamin who  remarked that the essence of the urban experience is the incongruity of chance encounters, and the effet de choc that these routinely cause the city-dweller. One of the most incongruous juxtapositions I have encountered anywhere in Paris lies just at the bottom of my street, where it meets the boulevards. There at the corner sits the Closerie des Lilas, a famous old restaurant dating to Montparnasse's quasi-rural past. And there in the little square just in front stands the statue of le Maréchal Ney, Napoléon's most celebrated commander. The Closerie, as its name suggests, is completely enclosed by a tall green floral hedge, a singular fact that gives it an air of bucolic tranquillity despite the busy boulevard. Marshall Ney, on the other hand, stands in an agonized posture, his neck twisted sideways and his sword poised over his head as if to decapitate some aggressor approaching from behind. One struggles to imagine what these two landmarks can possibly have to do with one another--did M. le Maréchal fail to make a reservation? Was the Suprême de canette "vigneronne" avec galette de pommes de terre aux cèpes not prepared to his taste?--yet there they are, sharing en permanence the same little piece of Parisian sidewalk.