The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  “Portrait of the creditor.” Illustration by Gavarni, from Clichy, 1840

  By the time of the July Revolution in 1830, according to Privat, they had split into two camps: the Bouzingos and the Jeunes-France. While the latter carried on with their doublets and forked beards, the former had moved through the centuries and arrived at the revolution of 1789: they styled their hair after Robespierre, wore waistcoats like Marat’s, boiled-leather or red felt hats, and carnations in their buttonholes, and carried cudgels. Not to be outdone, the Jeunes-France soon hit on the formula that Murger eventually made famous: they were dreamy, they were blasé, they brooded, nursed vague longings and inconsolable regrets, cultivated stark white complexions, suggested they were consumptive, turned to assorted religious affectations, such as quietism and Jansenism, and indulged in a “frightening” diet, apparently heavy on cornichons and vinegar. The Bouzingos, meanwhile, dropped the costume drama in favor of materialism and modernity: now they were all about beauty and youth; they drank and danced all night and slept all day. There were other camps as well, although Privat could remember only the Pur-Sangs and the Infatigables; another writer recalled the Badouillards. Somehow all of them faded away around 1838, leaving only a joint hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom they called “grocers.” The bourgeoisie nevertheless did their part by converting those fads into consumable objects, in the form of revivalist tchotchkes, which were still turning up at flea markets a century and a half later: “clocks in the shape of cathedrals, Gothic bindings, letter openers in the form of daggers, inkwells and night-lights and innumerable other objects made to look like dungeons or medieval castles with drawbridges, posterns, brattices, machicolations, watchtowers, allures…”

  “Hugoth”: a caricature of Victor Hugo as a Jeune-France, with appended verses by Petrus Borel, circa 1830

  Enid Starkie maintained that the Bouzingos and the Jeunes-France were the same group, the name having changed from the former to the latter in 1831. In any case, one or both of these cliques included former members of the Petit-Cénacle, many of whom had taken part in the first art riot, the planned set-to that accompanied the premiere of Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830: Nerval, Gautier, Petrus Borel, Aloysius Bertrand, Jehan du Seigneur (those last three had respectively been christened Pierre, Louis, and Jean), Augustus MacKeat (Auguste Macquet), Philothée O’Neddy (Théophile Dondey), Xavier Forneret, Célestin Nanteuil. The membership overlapped as well with that of the Club des Hashischins. On occasion they drank wine from human skulls, sometimes dispensed with clothing, gave recitals on musical instruments they did not know how to play. Nerval occasionally pitched a tent in his room, or slept on the floor next to a carved Renaissance bed he claimed to be in thrall to. Most famously, he had a pet lobster named Thibault, rescued from a fishmonger’s, which he, at least once, walked on a leash. Most of the Jeunes-France went on to respectable careers, although Borel took up an administrative post in Algeria but was driven by shifting political tides to subsistence farming, refusing to wear a hat because “nature knows what it’s doing,” and died of sunstroke. Nerval, of course, was found hanged with the belt of a woman’s apron from the grille of a cabinetmaker’s stall on Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne in 1855, wearing a hat, two shirts, two vests, and no coat, and with a tetragrammaton drawn in ink on the left side of his chest.

  Henri Murger once told Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, “Vous n’êtes pas un bohème, mais la bohème”—he was bohemia itself. Privat was born in Sainte-Rose, Guadeloupe, in 1815, son of a freewoman of color and an unknown father. His mother, who was very well-to-do—she was among other things a slave owner—sent him to be educated in Paris, but at some point the family’s fortunes declined, so that Privat was left to earn his own living, as a freelance writer. He returned to Point-à-Pitre only once, the story goes, and stayed for just twenty-three hours, this at a time when the Atlantic crossing took between twenty-five and thirty-five days. His primary allegiance was to Paris, and until his death from tuberculosis in 1859, he virtually owned the place, for all that he never had much money. He wore a “style-free” overcoat in all seasons and lived indifferently in furnished rooms, but never spent much time in any of them anyway, since he wrote in bars and cafés and occupied the better part of his days and nights walking. “Like [Louis-Sébastien] Mercier, he wrote his books with his legs,” wrote his colleague Alfred Delvau. He seemingly knew everyone in the city, from clochards to Balzac, knew every saloon keeper by name, was esteemed by all. Once, when he was set upon by thieves, he exclaimed, “But I’m Privat!”

  Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont. Woodcut by Écosse, 1857

  During the furor over the use by Alexandre Dumas and others of ghost writers (called, unfortunately, nègres), Privat made a case for them as prostitutes of the intellect; since those who were up in arms very likely visited prostitutes, they should understand. After Privat’s death it was alleged that he signed his own name to poems actually by Baudelaire, Nerval, and others of his friends, but recent scholarship has raised the question of whether some attributions shouldn’t run the other way around, one scholar demonstrating that Baudelaire’s novella La fanfarlo (1847) was based on a story by Privat called “Une grande coquette” (1842). In a letter to Eugène Sue in 1843, Privat wrote:

  Yes, our literature is etched in acid. Yes, we use blood and fire as others employ tears and warmth. But we were nursed on alcohol, not milk. We have seen in our streets things more terrible and scenes more awful than we could ever describe. We haven’t initiated twenty revolutions in forty or fifty years in order to stay where our grandparents were. If we deal in the terrible, it’s because everything around us is terrible. If we are anxious and ill at ease in our society, it’s because the future is there, more terrible and maybe more bloody than the past.

  The future was every bit as terrible as Privat forecast, but bohemia’s engagement with it fluctuated. While bohemians were prominent in the events of 1848 and in the Commune, bohemia more generally was a private and individual subjugation of class to the pure pursuit of art. Social mobility went both ways; an autodidact of humble background could conceivably, if he lived long enough, eventually occupy an armchair at the Académie Française, just as a rising young bourgeois could abandon studies in law or medicine to become an indigent poet, subsisting on café crèmes and whatever he could collect from passing the hat at the Chat Noir. There were, naturally, many more of the latter than of the former. Notice also the pronoun. Women were affiliated with bohemia, either as accessories, such as the original of Murger’s Mimi, a maker of lace and artificial flowers named Lucille Louvet; or occasionally as inspirations, such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859), the only woman Verlaine included in his 1884 anthology Les poètes maudits, a great visionary poet who led a life of such unrelieved misery she became known as Our Lady of Sorrows—although you do get the impression that for some bohemians the misery counted for more than the poems. There were also occasional anomalies, such as the adventurous Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), who spent most of her life in Algeria and whose work was published only posthumously. But women did not start to become fully accredited members of bohemia until after World War II—the first widely recognized woman bohemian may have been the indestructible Juliette Greco—and even then their art often seemed to be accompanied in popular estimation by a hovering asterisk.

  The masthead of Le Chat Noir, 1882

  Juliette Greco, early 1950s

  Bohemia, thus, was a kind of priesthood, demanding vows of poverty if not necessarily chastity, with a sideline in mystification. There was a kind of institutional bohemia, exemplified by the Club des Hydropathes, founded in 1878, which became Le Chat Noir, a salon-cum-nightclub as well as a magazine, which in turn lasted until the eve of the twentieth century. It drew tourists and rubberneckers, and is preserved in popular culture by its trademark haloed feline, designed by Steinlen, but its output and membership ran in every direction. There was always a jocular, bibulous side, represented by its early motto
“Wine is a red liquid, except in the morning, when it is white”—the mot is by Charles Cros (1842–1888), a considerable poet as well as an inventor who experimented with color photography and designed a prototype of the phonograph. Its contributors included Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Erik Satie, as well as future Academicians, in addition to, for example, the anarchist and street fighter Jules Jouy; or Édouard Dubus, who died at age thirty of a morphine overdose in a public urinal on Place Maubert;* or Jehan Rictus (né Gabriel Randon de Saint-Amand), who personified the romance of poverty and gave voice to it in his Soliloquies of the Poor Man (1897), written in slang and imperishably illustrated by Steinlen; always unworldly, Rictus devolved toward right-wing ultranationalism by the time he died in 1933.

  Jules Jouy, 1880s

  Le Chat Noir wound up an institution on the boulevards, a nightclub and tourist trap decorated with great numbers of pictures of black cats by Steinlen (Richard Harding Davis: “Upon one panel hundreds of black cats race over the ocean, in another they are waltzing with naiads in the woods, and in another they are whirling through space over red-tiled roofs, followed by beautiful young women, gendarmes, and boulevardiers in hot pursuit”). Well before that, it had initiated the bohemian hegira to Montmartre from the Left Bank. Montmartre, up on its heights, was a quiet country village in the late nineteenth century, atmospherically distant from the city below, with tree-lined lanes and old farmhouses and quite a few remaining windmills. Its bars tended to be rustic taverns with names to match: Le Clairon des Chasseurs or Le Vieux Chalet. Le Lapin Agile (which still exists, after a fashion) was an ancient guinguette locally known as Au Rendezvous des Voleurs (the Thieves’ Hangout); around 1880 the walls were covered with portraits of famous murderers (Lacenaire, Troppmann, Papavoine), after which it was called Le Cabaret des Assassins. Not long after that the owner hired the illustrator André Gill to paint a sign showing a rabbit escaping from a cooking pot, although it wasn’t until 1903, when Aristide Bruant bought it, that it came to be called by its familiar name, which also happened to pun on lapin à Gill. And then it quickly became a local for what was shaping up to be the foundational Montmartre crew of the early twentieth century: Picasso, Apollinaire, Utrillo, Carco, Mac Orlan, Fargue, and so on. And they in turn drew hundreds of epigones, who irrevocably altered the place, in what is certainly one of the earliest examples of an artistic vanguard paving the way for commerce and eventual gentrification. Ruefully looking back in 1929, Daniel Halévy wrote, “The Chat Noir was merely a sally, a frothy confection drunk within a few months. But it turned bad, there were disastrous consequences, and it brought to Montmartre the craze that ruined it. First there was the Moulin Rouge … and then the innumerable bars and their innumerable crooks.*

  Les soliloques du pauvre, by Jehan Rictus, cover by Théophile Steinlen, 1897

  The Lapin Agile in winter, circa 1910

  Still, the early bohemians in Montmartre did not have an easy time of it. The Lapin Agile was regularly invaded by apaches, and the owner’s son was killed in a robbery attempt. Bohemians were assaulted on the streets by thugs from the Goutte-d’Or and Château Rouge, who put out the gaslights by throwing rocks; some were murdered: “Blond, laughing Pierrot bled to death one night on Rue du Poteau; the ferocious Lagneau was knifed in the back; Mousseron, the deserter, went down on Rue Varon with six bullets in his gut; Critien was killed as he was changing hotels to escape from his enemies; little Pingouin was found hanged, his hands tied behind his back, from the fence-rail on Rue du Mont-Cenis.”

  Little birds of Montmartre struck down by winter. Illustration by Adolphe Willette, 1880s

  An alley in Montmartre, circa 1910

  And many bohemians themselves wound up in jail, in the penal colonies, or in the Bats d’Af. That was a direct consequence of their poverty, which could be extreme. The young Picasso for a time did not own shoes, and had to borrow a pair whenever he went out; he also didn’t have a chair, and had to paint sitting on the floor with his canvas leaning against the wall. Carco stole milk bottles from doorsteps, stole gas from streetlights, roasted meat on the hallway gas jet, sometimes climbed up a lamppost to heat a kettle on the flame, once in a restaurant dribbled gravy on the slate on which his bill was written, then called over the house dog to lick it clean. The artist André Dignimont was skilled at heisting coin machines; a poet named Georges Banneret developed a specialty of stealing photo albums from cathouses to flog the dirty pictures one by one. Many, such as Modigliani, squatted in empty houses; they were usually furnished with furniture stolen from café terraces, and heated with firewood stripped from the wooden pavements of the exterior boulevards.

  Anyone who has spent time in bohemia will recognize how responses to difficult material conditions can magically be transformed into fads. The fact that the Montmartre bohemians had no choice but to get their clothes from the Saint-Ouen flea market, and that weird clothes were cheaper there because they were less in demand, led them to try to outdo one another in the outlandishness of their getups. They wore Rembrandt hats, cavalry trousers, sailors’ jerseys, Spanish capes, mechanics’ jumpsuits, dusters, London coachmen’s capes, hooded cloaks, priests’ hats, jockeys’ caps, lavallieres; the women sometimes unearthed elaborate ballgowns or the short eighteenth-century jackets called pet en l’air (fart in the open)—it was as if they were replaying all the fads of the Childebert at once. Since oddball health regimes were also, almost inevitably, in effect, people went barefoot for reasons of “circulation” and wore colorful turbans that allegedly relieved headaches. Their parties were as loud and disruptive as things could get before the advent of amplified music: firecrackers, animal noises, breaking bottles, obscene songs, target practice with revolvers. In Le Bateau Lavoir, the crooked house (the source of its name remains obscure) on Rue Ravignan inhabited by Picasso, Fernande Olivier, Max Jacob, Juan Gris, Pierre Mac Orlan, Kees Van Dongen, and André Salmon, there were hidden staircases, concealed rooms, something like an oubliette—and one faucet for the entire building. Their famous banquet for Le Douanier (Henri) Rousseau in 1908 was marred somewhat by the fact that the food, ordered from a local hash house, didn’t arrive until noon the following day.

  The home of a popular singer in Montmartre, circa 1910

  A drinking party in a Montmartre backyard, 1910s

  An illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Les soliloques du pauvre, by Jehan Rictus, 1897

  The Montmartre bohemia before the First World War remains the gold standard, as much for the luxuriant eccentricity of its trappings as for the fact that so many of its players caught the brass ring. Subsequent manifestations never quite rose to that level of panache. The Montparnasse bohemia of the 1910s and ’20s had its own set of weirdos, including a man who dressed in full cowboy regalia and addressed his wife, in Native American duds, as “squaw”; his name was Le Scouëzec and he made a living painting Breton seascapes. That scene is preserved in memory chiefly because of its internationalism, however. La Rotonde, Le Dôme, and La Coupole hosted Lenin and Trotsky before 1917 and assorted Americans afterward. Despite the gilded recollections of so many of the latter gang, poverty was as much a feature there as elsewhere. Blaise Cendrars lived in a fleabag called Hôtel des Étrangers, an eighteenth-century house cut up into tiny cubicles:

  You could do everything without having to get up from your narrow bed: wash in the minuscule sink of tarnished and battered tin; cook an egg or reheat insipid vegetables by sticking the aluminum dish on top of the gas jet (which worked only if you fed it a constant stream of two-sous coins through a slot); or open the door, something you rarely did because you had long before abandoned all hope of anyone coming up the stairs and knocking.

  The same holds true for the Saint-Germain-des-Prés bohemia after World War II, remembered now for its jazz, its multiracialism, its airless cellar nightclubs, and of course its existentialism, a word that came to mean everything and nothing. But at least as much of that bohemia was happening in the Algerian cafés of Maubert, the clochard
cafés of the Contrescarpe, the squats and vacant lots and ruins of the city’s fringes. From that other end of bohemia, Guy Debord wrote:

  Paris was a city so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there than rich somewhere else … There was then, on the Left Bank of the river, a neighborhood where the negative held court … Those who assembled there seemed to have taken as their sole principle of action, as their public opening gambit, the secret which it is said the Old Man of the Mountain transmitted in his final moments only to the most faithful of his fanatical lieutenants: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” … It was the labyrinth best designed for catching travelers. Those who stopped there for two days never left, or at least not while it still existed … Nobody left those couple of streets and couple of tables where the climactic point of history had been found.

  9

  Show People

  The great fairs of the Middle Ages, which could last entire seasons and involved various proportions of commerce and entertainment, were broken up by the revolution. The Saint-Germain fair, which had begun in 1176 and ran from February 3 to Palm Sunday (which could fall anywhere from mid-March to mid-April), was unlike the others in having permanent structures. There is no record of what those buildings were used for the rest of the year, but it is assumed that some sort of shows went on in them at least some of the time; the fair became a year-round covered market in 1818. In the meantime, the whole class of clowns, jugglers, and mountebanks associated with it had migrated out to what was then the edge of the city, the old wall of the Farmers-General near Château d’Eau, the head of Boulevard du Temple. In 1792, when the restrictive laws governing theaters were overturned, a mass of showplaces began opening along that thoroughfare, hastily rigged-up houses that might last for a season or two and then be replaced by something else. The more spectators came, the more the street itself began to fill up with open-air entertainments, food stalls, ambulatory commerce, and, naturally, pickpockets.