Montmartre

“ Young men and women are fed into the blazing doors of the mill nightly, and the great arms, as they turn unceasingly and noisily in a fiery circle through the air, seem to tell of the wheels within that are grinding out the life and the health and souls of these young people of Montmartre. ”

“ Montmartre I visited when I was invited by generous Americans who had money to treat themselves and their friends to a hectic time. The Montmartre of the cabarets and music halls never excited me. It is so obviously a place where the very formal French allow foreigners who can pay to cut up informally. It has no character of its own. Paris, away from Montmartre and Montparnasse, seemed to me to be the perfect city of modern civilization. ”

“ The Butte, then, the real Montmartre, is in Paris, but not of it, and yet, of necessity, perpetually conscious of it,—a community which is and which is not a provincial town, which has an esprit de corps not inconsistent with independence, a unity not destructive of variety, and a sociability admirably accordant with a seemly privacy; while the Montmartrois sees Paris without being blinded by it, touches Paris without being crushed by it, and is stimulated by Paris without losing his identity therein. ”

“ Also, a painter in the rue Ravignan might lend us a few of his failures—'Before you go, let me show you my pictures,' said monsieur Tricotrin: 'I am an ardent collector'!"
In Montmartre the sight of two "types" shifting household gods makes no sensation—the sails of the remaining windmills still revolve. ”

“ It is a settled thing that Paris is the home of vice. French novels of the day attest this fact; so do the lyrics of the halls of pleasure, where that decadent songstress, Yvette Guilbert (admired of decadent London) , offers the strangest entertainment that ever delighted mankind in search of distraction; so, above all, do the songs of the unpublished poets of Montmartre, who fondly and seriously take themselves for misprized genius in the lump, and pose as so many Verlaines. ”

“ At the hour when respectable Paris, home-loving, domestic Paris, the Paris of which the tourist sees so little, is thinking of retiring, Montmartre—or that section of it in which L'Abbaye is situated—begins to open its eyes. At ten-thirty, as my cab buzzed into the square and pulled up at the curb, the electric signs were blazing, the sidewalks were, if not yet crowded, at least well filled, and the sounds of music from the open windows of The Dead Rat and the other cafes with the cheerful names were mingling with noises of the street. ”

“ Paris is a midnight city, it is true, and at this hour the heights of Montmartre were thronged with pleasure-seekers, dancing and supping till the pale dawn should come with its message of purity and reproach. ”

“ After the Moulin Rouge or the Bal Tabarin or such, comes, of course, a visit to one of the night cafés of the Montmartre district. Their names in themselves are supposed to indicate their weird and alluring character—the Café of Heaven, the Café of Nothingness, and,—how dreadful—the Café of Hell. "Montmartre," says one of the latest English writers on Paris, "is the scene of all that is wild, mad, and extravagant. Nothing is too grotesque, too terrible, too eccentric for the Montmartre mind." Fiddlesticks! What he means is that nothing is too damn silly for people to pay to go to see. ”

“ All these are edifying sights, for they show you how decorously and charmingly the French people can take their diversions and how good-humoured and well-mannered a French crowd can be. If you venture up to Montmartre, the hill of impropriety, you will find a different quality in the entertainment offered. You will be less convinced of the moral and mental value of the nation. A great deal of hot blue wine is consumed, and the desperadoes of misprized genius meet to shock and shake the foundations of the hill by their stupid ruffianism in verse. ”

“ And those of Montmartre are often just as good as those of the boulevard, they are printed in the papers; from one end of France to the other, they excite laughter. For, at least, the French know how to laugh.
Why should one good thing more than another, the unexpected, quaint, juxtaposition of two terms, two ideas or even two sounds; a ridiculous pun, some unexpected cock-and-bull story, open the floodgates of our gaiety, causing explosions of mirth, fit to blow up all Paris and the provinces like a mine? ”

“ André Joyeux laughed in his stride:
“Ay, comrades,” said he—“it is we on the Hill of Martyrs who live.... Climb Montmartre, and you are in a rare atmosphere—get you up amongst the scaffolding a-top of it, and you may touch the clouds—the air is light, vivacious, exciting as wine—solemn things and dull talk fall away from you—you must stoop if you would kiss the hand to Paris, stoop to hail her, stoop to see her. Here we condescend to the world. ”

“ One of my rides is through the plain that lies between St. Ouen and Montmartre, ascending the latter by its rear to the windmills that, night and day, are whirling their ragged arms over the capital of France. Thence I descend into the town by the carriage road. A view from this height is like a glimpse into the pages of history; for every foot of land that it commands, and more than half the artificial accessories, are pregnant of the past. Looking down into the fissures between the houses, men appear the mites they are ”

“ Thirty howitzers were placed on this height, and a few shells were thrown into the town, one or two of which, we were assured, reached as far as the Eglise de St Eustace; it is allowed on all hands that they fell within the Boulevards. The heights of Montmartre were at the same time stormed by the Silesian army, and cannon were placed on it likewise,—Paris was then at his mercy. ”

“ The students from the Quartier Latin, moreover, came to share their joyous, reckless hours of leisure between their own beloved neighbourhood of the Boul’ Mich’, and the far-away Mount of the Windmills—Montmartre.
Peasants, workgirls, the starving, the insane, the destitute, those who are fighting misery and those who are making it, garrotters, thieves, murderers, and a large assortment of parasitical ruffians as well, have all found a sympathetic student and recorder in Steinlen. ”

“ Back of every blaze of light in Montmartre there is a shadow, and from out of many of these dark corners flutter to the lights of the Boulevard de Clichy, like nocturnal moths, scores of gaudy women—too frequently the spiders who dare not venture in the sun and whose claws have been known to have been smeared with the blood of the helpless more than once, crawl from these squalid holes beyond the light. ”

“ There are a quartette of these famous resting-places at Paris which, since the coming of the nineteenth century, have had an absorbing interest for the curiously inclined. Père la Chaise, Montmartre, the royal sepulchres in the old abbey church of St. Denis, and the churchyard of St. Innocents.
“Man,” said Sir Thomas Brown, “is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.” ”

“ He visited Paris, Paris striving to display its old pre-war gayety in the sunny days of a perfect spring. He looked up some old acquaintances, English and Italian artists of the Latin Quarter for the most part, and drank wine with them and talked and tried to recapture some of the old carefree spirit in the musty cafés of Montmartre. He attended the theatre, alone and in the company of his friends and browsed among the galleries and shops, making a few purchases and forwarding them to Dorning and Son. ”

“ The only audience who could appreciate the results of close observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and local color, are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a vale of crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale of sorrows which are real and joys too often hollow ”

“ Here are placed immense machine guns. Up at Montmartre, the people gather in little circles to read the letters they have received from their soldier boys and to discuss the possibility of Paris being captured. They have forgotten all about their once lively dance-halls and cabarets. There are but few artists left in this quarter now, for they have either gone home or to the front, while the women and children amuse themselves reading the last extra or listening to an organ-grinder giving them many patriotic airs for a few sous. ”

“ On the hill-side most memorable happenings have been lived through. In the old streets and houses up and down its slopes poets and artists have ever dwelt, worked and played, and in its theatres, its music-halls, cabarets, etc., Parisians of all classes have sought amusement—good and evil. In past days Paris depended on Montmartre for its daily bread, for the flour that made it was ground by the innumerable windmills of the Butte. The sails of many of those windmills worked far into the reign of Napoléon III, who did not admire their aspect and even had a scheme for levelling the Butte! ”

“ In Revolution days it was known as Rue Mont-Marat! As long as Paris had fortified boundary walls there was always a Porte Montmartre, moved northward three times, as the city bounds extended. The Porte of Philippe-Auguste was where the house No. 30 now stands, and this part of the street was known then as Rue Porte-Montmartre. The Passage de la Reine de Hongrie memorizes a certain dame de la Halle in whom Marie-Antoinette saw a remarkable likeness to her mother, the Queen of Hungary. The woman became for her generation “la Reine de Hongrie”—the alley where she dwelt was called by this name. ”

“ I copy the following, verbatim:—
'After being on guard the day before yesterday, for twenty-six hours, without anything worse than repeated alarms, my husband and son returned and are somewhat rested. Yesterday we went to Montmartre—a very populous and stirring quarter. I cannot tell you often enough how well Paris is behaving; enthusiasm and unanimity prevail everywhere; the good and the wise have silenced the fools. This will raise up France; it is a balm for many sorrows. I can assure you the country is not demoralised. ”

“ The church spire of the former is one of the most beautiful objects in view from Montmartre, the church itself, which was desecrated in the revolution, having been restored by Napoleon. St. Denis is celebrated, in the Catholic annals, by the fact of the martyr, from whom the name is derived, having walked after decapitation, with his head under his arm, all the way from Paris to this very spot.
Montmorency is a town of no great size or importance, but lying on the side of a respectable mountain, in a way to give the spectator more than a profile, it appears to be larger than it actually is. ”

“ Or the Foolish Virgins, one or several, would call up into the twilight, whooping her down from her high lodgment, and take her for a ramble along the quays or into the elaborately planned wildness of the city’s woods, or straight across the river into the boulevards with their glitter and colour and the shops of fashion; or away up to the heights of Montmartre they would step it, climbing the steep streets to look down upon the city, and home again, loitering before print-shops and places where they sell artistic things. ”

“ As I ascend the street grows whiter, and at the Butte it is empty of everything except the white rays of noon. There are some dusty streets, and silhouetting against the dim sky a dilapidated façade of some broken pillars. Some stand in the midst of ruined gardens, circled by high walls crumbling and white, and looking through a broken gateway I see a fountain splashing, but nowhere the inhabitants that correspond to these houses--only a workwoman, a grisette, a child crying in the dust. The Butte Montmartre is full of suggestion ”

“ There is a large class of poets, painters, sculptors and musicians for whom the wheel of fortune spins capriciously. Their idle hours are spent among their comrades in the cabarets and the little boîtes tucked away in odd corners of Montmartre, where they breakfast and dine, accompanied by their sweethearts. ”

“ There is no scenery round Paris so striking as the forest of Fontainbleau, but the heights of Belleville exhibit nature in a more pleasing aspect, and are distinguished by features of a gentler character. Montmartre, and the ridge of Belleville, form those celebrated heights which command Paris on the northern side, and which were so obstinately contested between the allies and the French on the 30th March 1814, previous to the capture of Paris by the allied Sovereigns. ”

“ The next day about noon, the Emperor of Russia and King of Prussia entered Paris by the barrier of Villette, at the head of 50,000 men. A French writer remarks, that Montmartre is rendered famous by the gallant-stand made there by a small body of French troops against the whole of the allied army. The French cannot bring themselves to allow that their nation has the worst in any contest. They are now, however, sensible that they have been defeated, which no doubt conduces greatly to their present ill humour. ”

“ The Orléanists, Bonapartists, Anti-Semites, and their allies were quick to see the value of a popular leader in the most turbulent and unmanageable quarter of Paris. The Quartier Latin was second [353] only to Montmartre as a propagating bed for revolution; the fiery youth of the great schools were quite as important as the butchers of La Villette. ”

“ There are thousands of them eagerly awaiting the appearance of the Presse, Intransigeant, and other papers. The narrow, picturesque old street is one seething mass of human beings. Hundreds also wait in the Rue Montmartre. As they wait, they pass the time by playing cards or dice. ”

“ On the 1st of February, 1795, the bust of Marat, placed in several of the theatres and cafés, was hooted and overthrown. His remains, according to the Abbé de Montgaillard in his history of the Revolution, were snatched from the Panthéon, dragged through the streets by young men, and cast amongst the refuse of the Rue Montmartre—“a tabernacle,” says the abbé, “worthy of such a god.” ”