by Luc Sante
At the other end of the social scale, much of what passed for high life was barely less sordid. Everyone wanted to party—faire la fête. The Bonneffs explain that there were two basic strategies for realizing this ambition. Method one, the “serious” approach, was to visit a fashionable cabaret after the show, accompanying or meeting a lady, and then dance to the gypsy orchestra, sup in a private salon, and go home at dawn. Method two, the “frivolous” one, was to go up to Montmartre and run through as many cabarets as possible, ordering large quantities of champagne everywhere and offering it all around, with special attention to the ladies—the more ladies surrounding the party hound, the better the party. He would bestow flowers and cigarettes upon them and engage with them in coarse repartee, and then, having emptied the bottles and broken as many of them as he could, he would jump into a cab and have himself driven to another such establishment, where the routine would repeat itself. The most experienced lounge lizard could count on visiting twelve or thirteen boîtes in one night. A year later, André Warnod chronicled the aftermath:
All night long there has been a great hubbub of feverish activity, as if it were a factory, and when calm returns in the morning it looks as if a battle has been fought and lost. The last customers depart at dawn. The dancers wrap their coats around their vividly colored dresses; their makeup looks hideous in the light of day. At tables here and there, among empty bottles and dirty dishes, linger the poor girls that nobody wanted. A drunk snickers to himself in a corner. The waiters, the dancers, and the gypsies go home, their job done, exhausted, not with that good fatigue that comes from achieving a task, but rather as if they, too, had dragged themselves aimlessly through the orgy that had just sputtered out only to spark again a few hours thence.
These were the extremes, anyway, always more noticeable and memorable for their emotional violence but not necessarily indicative of the general experience. People had always been drinking in Paris. In a world before timetables and engines, there were fewer hazards to beginning the day with spiked coffee and going on from there. Long before unions fought to shorten the working day and the workweek, it was widely if unofficially accepted that workers would keep the party going into Monday (la Saint-Lundi) and would not be available for duty then. Most people drank, in reasonable or unreasonable quantities, in locals where they felt at home and wouldn’t be cheated, places that would become extensions of their furnished rooms, where they would come to know the other customers, who would eventually become a sort of prosthetic family.
Nightclubbing with Léon-Paul Fargue, Voilà, 1935
An illegal dive. Illustration from Blaise Cendrars’s Panorama de la pègre, 1935
Cafés developed their own codes, rituals, prejudices, depending on an intricate triangulation of management, location, and clientele. If you were unwelcome you wouldn’t know it from the street, and you wouldn’t even necessarily know it even when you were inside sitting behind a glass; you might just feel a slight chill in the air if you were sufficiently sensitive. That the place was the exclusive preserve of purse snatchers or monarchists or chicken hawks or anti-Semites might entirely elude you. And such specialization, in a time when there was a bistro on every corner and eight per block, was not only common but essential to the business. As Léon-Paul Fargue noticed in the 1930s, there were “cafés for unemployed saxophone players, cafés for Armenian tailors, cafés for Spanish barbers, cafés for nude women, for dancers, for maîtres d’hôtel, for bookmakers, for street urchins—even the smallest joint seems to exist to serve drinks to specific professions or else to styles of vagrancy that leave no room for doubt.”
A rustic saloon by a pond, circa 1910
Paradoxically, that was also the era described by Richard Cobb as “when the night was still democratic and à la portée de tout le monde [affordable by everyone],” when in a café the archetypal faubourg characters “le père la Tulipe and Jojo la Terreur might encounter, at the bar, a noceur, in white tie, a runaway accountant, or a lovesick monsieur décoré, not a flight of fantasy, but an accurate representation of a limitless sociability that did exist, especially between midnight and four in the morning…” But then, that was the Paris of the Popular Front, when, however briefly, it seemed as if the barriers of class had been broken down and would remain fallen.
Chez Guignard, on Place Maubert, 1930s
Although the Popular Front government sadly lasted only two years (1936–38), the democratic wind blew at various speeds—and not without a corresponding blowback from the far right—from the worldwide Crash of 1929 until Hitler became an immediate threat ten years later. One of its cultural harbingers was Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), in which a bookseller rescues from the Seine an uncivilized free spirit named Boudu, who proceeds to call down chaos upon the bookseller’s tidy existence. Boudu, large, hairy, and inarticulate, was probably intended (by René Fauchois, the playwright on whose work the movie is based) as a child of nature out of Rousseau, but the way Michel Simon plays him leaves little doubt as to his social category: even though he doesn’t seem to be a drunk, he is inescapably a clochard. This word, the first published use of which was apparently by Aristide Bruant in 1895, derives from cloche (bell) and signifies a bum or hobo. There are various theories as to its etymology: that it comes from an argot term for “limping”; that it alludes to the bell announcing the official end of marketplace hours, when scavengers were free to collect unsold produce; that it evokes beggars who rang bells to accompany their pleas; that it summons a memory of when the post of bell ringer at various churches was given to the neediest member of the congregation. My favorite, though, is Jean-Paul Clébert’s: that the cloche is the sky, and all who sleep under it are its children.
A collector of cigarette butts. Drawing by Gustave Fraipont, 1891
A North African immigrant who became a clochard explained to Robert Giraud in the early 1950s that
it’s easy to become a clochard in Paris. One day you put on a jacket and you say, that’s my shirt, and then you put on another jacket and this time you say, that’s my jacket, and then you slip on a third—my overcoat. After that you go sit on the quais and you meet other guys like you, also clochards, and with them you smoke some butts and you drink some liters. At night you sleep under the bridges or on top of the sand heaps. When winter comes the clochards die like flies, because it’s cold and they don’t have on enough jackets, but that’s how it goes. In spring others will come and the cycle will start all over again.
The clochard drinks and sleeps, and scrounges or begs or steals or sells junk on Sundays at Saint-Médard or works up schemes or sometimes takes on labor at Les Halles or on the docks. There were old clochards and young ones, mostly men and a few women, quite a few couples—Giraud met a man and a woman who’d been bumming together for twenty-seven years. For that matter he met a grandmother, father, and son, all clochards and happily drinking together. Some were lifers, at it since they were kids. Others had had previous lives, real or imagined. This one claimed he’d been a professor of philosophy, that one was a retired librarian from the Bibliothèque Nationale, another had spent forty years in the Bats d’Af (the Battalions d’Infanterie Légère d’Afrique, the disciplinary corps) and had the tattoos to prove it.
An illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Les soliloques du pauvre, by Jehan Rictus, 1897
They slept on the quais—those by the Gare d’Austerlitz were particularly commodious and reasonably untroubled, and enterprising clochards built shelters out of crates and planks and maybe car parts. Or in decent weather sometimes they camped in vacant lots. Or else they slept in abandoned houses or sheds in courtyards or maybe empty attics in otherwise occupied houses. If you were bold and discreet you might climb up to the top story of some apartment building and start trying doors—you had a good chance of eventually happening upon an unused storeroom. There were innumerable places to sleep with reasonable protection from weather, but you had to really want it. “All those hideouts are impossib
le for the ordinary piker down below to find, pounding the pavements with his nose in the air. You have to have a vital need, be obsessed with the idea of four walls and a roof, of a shelter from the elements, at the same time that you categorically refuse to be jammed in with others in a barracks.” Giraud observed that “a sleeping clochard always looks like a corpse, ideally a headless corpse. Before checking out, as a matter of protection, he wraps his head in a newspaper or a rag, or hikes up his jacket or coat or shirt, whatever he has on. The ostrich, also a biped, does the same.” The alternative, for the desperate or in times of police crackdowns, was called refiler la comète, “to retrace the path of the comet”—that is, to keep walking all night.
The racing-form vendor, circa 1910
Until they were dispensed with by the city at some indefinable point within the past few decades (sent to whichever atoll or Siberia all the major cities of the Western world exiled their outsiders with the advent of the corporate age), the clochard had no history—or barely any, aside from periodic disturbances such as the edict of 1657, among others, forbidding begging, which dispersed the strongest to the provinces and the weakest to the hospitals. Then there was the life span of the newspaper L’Intransigeant, popularly known as L’Intran, the selling of which on street corners seemed to be reserved exclusively for clochards. Started in 1880, the paper initially marked the first resurgence of a left-wing press after the fall of the Commune in 1871—its entire staff was made up of former Communards, and it was a sign of hope for those returning to Paris from the penal colonies in New Caledonia after the general amnesty that same year. It was edited for decades by Henri Rochefort, a Communard himself, who changed his spots, however, and rallied in the late 1880s to the cause of the protofascist general Georges Ernest Boulanger, who nearly led a coup d’état in 1889—he lost his nerve at the last minute, and killed himself two years later—and then, in the following decade, broadcast virulently anti-Semitic propaganda during the Dreyfus Affair. L’Intran, which lasted until 1940 and managed a brief revival after the war, was viewed for much of its twentieth-century existence less as a journalistic voice than as a way of keeping its vendors alive. Victor Serge, newly arrived in Paris around 1910, made the acquaintance of an ancient vendor of L’Intran who was an amateur translator of Virgil and a disciple of Georges Sorel and the anarchist Mécislas Goldberg. Nevertheless, this man lived “in a terrifying world of the most extreme indigence, of willing surrender.” He and his kind “descended in a direct line from the first beggars of Paris, perhaps from the lowest rabble of Lutetia … The clochard is a terminal being, his inner resources destroyed, who has learned to savor, feebly but tenaciously, the speck of vegetative existence that is allotted him.”
The occasional clochard could become a character, appreciated by a wider audience, who bought him drinks for his diverting skills. One of these, although more an eccentric than a drunk, was André-Joseph Salis, known as Bibi-la-Purée (the latter part of his name signifies, basically, “trouble”), an occasional porter, shoe shiner, artist’s model, go-between, beggar, thief (of umbrellas, in particular), and police informant, who served as boon companion to Paul Verlaine and was described as his secretary, his duties consisting chiefly of getting the poet home safely when he was blind drunk, which was often. Bibi-la-Purée, known for wearing unpredictable assortments of random clothes, was rendered by Picasso, Théophile Steinlen, and Jacques Villon, and celebrated in poems by Jehan Rictus and Raoul Ponchon as well as Verlaine himself, and even makes an appearance in the French translation of Joyce’s Ulysses (where he stands in for the original’s “Dusty Rhodes”); there were also two movies made about him, in 1925 and 1935. After Verlaine’s death in 1896, Bibi-la-Purée made a living selling forged autographs and random found objects as having belonged to the poet; apparently he sold at least ten different walking sticks—“with a heavy heart”—as Verlaine’s.
Bibi-la-Purée
But then Verlaine, for all that he was the Prince of Poets (elected by his peers in 1894), edged awfully near to the status of clochard himself, shuttling from rat hole to public hospital, lying senseless on café banquettes or in doorways, saved from incarceration or certain death innumerable times only by his friends and his prestige. (Allegedly, some police commissioner or other ordained that he was never to be arrested.) In more than just his case, the distance between bohemia and the cloche could often seem perilously close. But that had always been the case. “Bohemia,” derived from the name of what was believed to be the homeland of the Roma, was employed as a term for people “who lead a life without rules,” in the words of the seventeenth-century chronicler Tallemant des Réaux, long before it enjoyed any artistic connotations. A comprehensive accounting of its original compass was provided by Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire: “… vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, macquereaux [pimps], brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème.” The insertion of “literati” into the list should be taken as served.
Paul Verlaine on his corner banquette, 1890s
“Idleness.” Illustration by Gavarni, 1835
Most of us know about the origins of bohemia, directly or indirectly, from Henri Murger, who wrote the episodic seminovel Scènes de la vie de bohème in serial installments for a paper called Le Corsaire-Satan—Baudelaire was another contributor, although not a friend—that were collected into a book in 1848. In that turbulent and sobering year of upheaval, Murger’s sentimental tales of the nobility of art triumphing, if only spiritually, over disease, poverty, and neglect must have struck a chord with people who desperately needed an escapist fantasy version of their troubles. From his perch at the Café Momus, in the pre-Haussmann warren of narrow streets between the Louvre and Les Halles, Murger, a working-class belletrist with no money and many afflictions—purpura gave him a “macabre” complexion, his eyes watered incessantly—wrote stories about idealized versions of his friends. The details of their setting and plot have been worn transparent from passing through so many hands over so many years (Puccini’s opera most obviously, and a score of film adaptations): the quest for inspiration, the pawning of possessions, the commodity value of the black frock coat, the knell that sounds as a slight tubercular cough. “Starving artists” has become a trade name for hucksters selling couch art from China in New Jersey motel conference rooms.
“An original character,” Latin Quarter, 1930s
Murger’s book has both endured and faded because of its fervent, wholehearted, mulishly determined sentimentality. It branded bohemia, gave it an origin myth—the book is highfalutin pulp, but its premise and story are so elemental they might have fallen from a tree. The myth endures even now in some form or other, and it will probably last even when the actual fact of bohemia has no remaining living witnesses. Murger watered and tended his notion of bohemia, trying to keep it free from radicalism and crime, and from those categories enumerated by Marx. He made it into a sort of secular religion, all noble suffering and unjust persecution. In 1849 he wrote that it was “bordered on the north by hope, work, and gaiety, on the south by necessity and courage, on the west and east by slander and the hospital.” Needless to say, while he may have created an enduring myth, he had no influence of any sort on the conduct of actual bohemians, then or later.
An American paperback edition of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, 1948
But artistic bohemia had already been in effect for a generation by the time Murger sat down to write. Its earliest manifestation may have been hatched beginning around 1818, by the students of Guillaume Guillon Lethière, a neoclassical painter and rival of Jacques-Louis David. Lethière, born in Guadeloupe, the illegitimate son of a French colonial administrator and a local woman of mixed race, lived and worked in a building called Le Ch
ildebert, on the street of the same name (now Rue Bonaparte, the house razed long ago in the lengthening of that street). His students, who included Théodore Rousseau and possibly the Johannot brothers, Tony and Alfred,* moved into the building, apparently a slum with crumbling stairs, broken windows, and sweating walls, which a certain Madame Legendre had bought for spare change in some property clearance during the revolution and allowed to slide into decrepitude. Soon they formed one of those tight, shifting, contentious, excitable, fickle, impassioned, impatient, incestuous, untidy coagulations of which students are uniquely capable. They seem to have been the first vanguard of Romanticism in French painting, anticipating the signal works of Géricault and Delacroix by half a decade. They began painting landscapes directly from nature rather than from idealized classical models, for example, leading hostile critics to accuse them, in a phrase that was to be slung against vanguards for the next two hundred years, of waging a “crusade against beauty.”
More significantly, they launched, perpetrated, and then squelched dozens of fads, in a way that feels familiar to us but appears to have had few precedents. There was, for example, a medieval fad, countering the prevailing obsession with Greece and Rome, which began with their reading cheap romances and soon had them wearing satin jerkins and gigot sleeves, carrying around lyres and short swords, and speaking in affected medievalese. They even changed their names accordingly: every Jean became a Jehan, every Pierre a Petrus, every Louis a Loÿs. Then they were on to the Scots (via Sir Walter Scott), the modern Greeks (thanks to Byron), the Turks (by way of Lamartine’s Méditations and Hugo’s Orientales), the Spaniards, pirates. They alternately grew their hair to their shoulders, after the English Cavaliers, and shaved it down to a stubble, after the Roundheads. At the theater they made a great show of yawning at tragedies and laughing at melodramas. “A great anxiety haunted them: everything had to be new at all costs.”