Renoir's Dancer

by Catherine Hewitt

  The area’s nightlife was renowned, and now, being of the age and inclination to appreciate it, Maria was soon swept up by its heady lure. Once a solitary child, painfully aware of her difference, she was now surrounded by creative, artistic people, people with imagination and ideas and passion – people just like her. It was liberating. At last, she was accepted just as she was. And whatever the hour and the night of the week, there was an activity on offer in Montmartre and acquaintances desperate that she should participate.

  On the nights when Maria had not been invited to a studio party by one or other of the contacts she had made through modelling, there were dance halls, cabarets, cafés, bars and taverns to spoil even the most ravenous of social gastronomes. Each had its own unique character and distinct clientele.

  The Elysée Montmartre was a familiar landmark to Maria. It was open all year round, and in the 1880s it was responsible for launching the craze of the French cancan.2 Determined thighs kicked their way out from under swathes of lace and gauze, in ribald defiance of popular notions of propriety. Only occasionally did the management impose its authority, ‘when a girl who had left her briefs behind so raised her leg that everybody was invited to appreciate de visu [with one’s own eyes] that this oversight was a trifling matter’.3 There was also the Boule Noire, a ‘second or third class’ establishment, sniffed a contemporary tourist guide, but one which nevertheless acted as an irresistible magnet to swarms of eager dancers.4

  But of all the dance halls, it was undoubtedly the Moulin de la Galette that best epitomised Montmartre’s inimitable blend of bucolic nostalgia and carefree sociability. The mill-turned-dance hall had its detractors, but for its converts it remained the sunny idyll of conviviality and good feeling which Renoir captured in his Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876).5 The mill took its name from the small cereal-based flat cakes or pancakes which its owners, the Debray millers, served to visitors, originally with milk before their innocuous offering was exchanged for a far more palatable glass of mulled wine from the 1830s.6 By the 1870s, the Sunday dances had turned the Moulin de la Galette into a hub of social activity. From mid-afternoon, excitable working-class girls in home-made dresses and boastful lads in shirtsleeves flocked to the mill, where in fine weather, dances moved to the courtyard outside. The cares of the week evaporated as giggling couples spun round and round to the cheerful melodies of the band, while exhausted stragglers rested and whetted their whistles at tables erected in the shade of the surrounding acacia trees. Chatter and laughter bubbled out from the venue until midnight, and the whole atmosphere was that of a lively village fete.

  However, a teenager did not need to appreciate dancing to have a good time in Montmartre. Paris’s burgeoning café scene was an intrinsic part of the social fabric by the 1880s. Cafés had suffered severe repression in the 1870s under then president Marshal MacMahon’s harsh ‘moral order’ regime.7 Viewed as hotbeds of political opposition, they were monitored with suspicion. Added to which, in 1873, the Loi Roussel had imposed controls on alcohol consumption in a bid to quash incidents of public drunkenness. Hence, when the formal controls were relaxed in the summer of 1880, café culture emerged into a golden era.

  ‘In Paris, cafés are an important resource for everyone,’ declared one contemporary guidebook, but ‘particularly for the flâneur’, that cool, aloof observer of urban society.8 In a city whose population included a swelling number of migrants, cafés provided an environment which afforded proximity without prior acquaintance and where new connections could be formed. Moreover, Haussmann’s wider pavements now brought café life spilling out on to the street.9 All at once, public life overshadowed private, strangers shared spaces and relationships became uncertain. The café terrace offered a strategic vantage point from which to assess the city and its inhabitants. ‘Sat outside, you can philosophically judge Paris in all its animation and contemplate a new and constantly changing world as you savour your demi-tasse,’ explained a popular tourist guide.10 In order to sample this delight, visitors were advised to stroll along to the café ‘in the evening, at about 10 o’clock’, or more particularly, ‘around five, absinthe o’clock’.11

  It was a loaded reference. Absinthe, or wormwood, the liquorice-flavoured, plant-based liqueur, had been popular in France throughout the 19th century. Though the drink was of Swiss origin, heavy tax on import had encouraged H.L. Pernod to start producing it commercially in France at the end of the 18th century.12 It was a tremendous success, and as the 19th century unfolded, its popularity soared. Exceedingly potent, it was closer to a soft drug than a drink. ‘The drunkenness it gives does not resemble any known drunkenness,’ bemoaned Alfred Delvau. ‘It makes you lose your footing right away […] You think you are headed towards infinity, like all great dreamers, and you are only headed towards incoherence.’13 In excess, absinthe could have a fatal effect on the nervous system, and by the time Maria started attending the bars and cafés where it was served, it had become a national curse. A favourite drink among the working classes precisely because of its relative cheapness for the effect produced, absinthe became the scapegoat for a host of social ills, not least the Commune. But in a supreme illustration of the vicious circle of capitalism, producers (both legitimate and crooks who would cut or substitute the drink with other, cheaper substances), could not resist its lucrative potential, just as addicts fell victim to the liquid’s power to lift their earthly worries, if only temporarily.

  Absinthe found a dedicated following among artists, writers and poets (including Charles Baudelaire), for whom the liquor became the entrancing ‘green fairy’. Its popularity in these circles was due primarily to its intoxicating effect, but also because its consumption was accompanied by a curious ritual which appealed to quirky individuals with a taste for the extraordinary. To counteract the drink’s inherent bitterness, a sugar lump was placed on a special spoon with a hole in it, which was held above the glass while water was poured over it, with the effect of sweetening the absinthe. Not surprisingly, absinthe flowed freely through the bars and cafés of Montmartre.

  However, even where absinthe was not involved, for a single bourgeois woman to attend a café unaccompanied would have had catastrophic repercussions in the 19th century. Her reputation would have been irretrievably tarnished – only demi-mondaines and working-class girls with no regard for morals attended such places. And yet it was in the café that prominent male artists like Manet held court, where the most revolutionary and exhilarating aesthetic debates took place, and where the deepest artistic friendships were formed. Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt had to forge careers around this glaring absence in their résumés. But Maria was not a member of the bourgeoisie. Her lower-class status earned her entry to the café, while her work as a model gained her access to an even more exclusive club: the world of the artists and their conversation. Modelling thereby handed her the key to unlock a door which remained firmly bolted to the likes of Morisot, Cassatt and even many lower-class women.

  Maria soon discovered the café which was to become her favourite. The Lapin Agile was a rustic hillside tavern-cum-café on the corner of the Rue des Saules.14 It had green-painted shutters, a charming little terrace with wooden picnic tables, and a swashbuckling history. It had begun life as the Rendez-Vous des Voleurs, in triumphant recognition of all Montmartre’s outlaws, before becoming the Cabaret des Assassins in the 1860s. The name change was part of an ingenious marketing strategy by the innkeeper, which predicted that a nod to the area’s history of gruesome crimes would be good for business, particularly in view of the mood aroused by the recent trial of the serial killer M. Troppman. But when Maria first started taking her seat at the long stretch of joined-together tables by the bar, or in the shade of the trees on the leafy terrace, the inn had just undergone its final transformation. In 1875, humorist and cartoonist André Gill had been asked to redesign the sign, and drawing inspiration from the inn’s list of specialties, he painted an ungainly rabbit springing out of a saucepan balanci
ng a bottle of wine on its paw, with a cap sliding drunkenly off its head. Perpetuating Gill’s wit, the Lapin à Gill soon contracted into the Lapin Agile. Locals jealously guarded their seats at the venue, but in its new guise and with its relaxed ambience and music, the inn quickly became the un-missable evening haunt of students, writers and artists, as well as pimps, prostitutes and Montmartre’s full cast of eccentrics. For regulars – which is what Maria became – the inn was something of an institution, and one patron fondly remembered, ‘you could sit for the whole evening into the small hours with the same drink.’15

  But if Maria felt like a change of scene and company, just a short walk down the hill past the rising silhouette of the Sacré-Coeur (which had been climbing steadily up the Montmartre skyline since its construction began in the mid-1870s), she could take a seat for the evening in the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes. Conveniently located on the Place Pigalle, it was to this café that Édouard Manet and his Impressionist companions had switched allegiance from the Café Guerbois in the 1870s.16 It was also the café whose unremarkable interior Edgar Degas used as the setting for his In the Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–1876). Of an evening, a visitor could expect to find Manet surrounded by artists such as Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, and writers like Émile Zola and Edmond Duranty. As Irishman George Moore explained, attendance at the café was not so much an entertainment – it was an education. ‘I did not go to Oxford or Cambridge,’ he proudly announced, ‘but I went to the Nouvelle Athènes.’ He vividly remembered:

  the white face of that café, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of those two streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass door of the café grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o’clock, the fragrant odour of absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer […] The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticized till two o’clock in the morning.17

  The fruit of these discussions changed the course of art history; it was here that the idea of the first independent Impressionist exhibition was born.18

  Maria adored lengthy conversations with kindred spirits and creative minds. But when fatigue or lethargy rendered a less participatory entertainment appealing, Montmartre also boasted several café-concerts. Like alcohol and coffee, song had been cast as the faithful servant of political opposition when Louis-Napoleon came to power.19 Singing in cafés was consequently one of the first forms of expression outlawed under his regime. However, when a series of decrees in the 1860s had lifted many of the restrictions imposed on entertainment venues (notably by permitting the use of props, costumes and music), café-concerts had begun to flourish. By the 1880s, there were over 200 such venues belting out hearty songs about working-class life across Paris. Along with the usual facilities of a café, café-concerts also offered a small indoor stage or a covered pavilion outside where singers, and sometimes acrobats and comedians, performed for an often raucous audience. Patrons paid more than they would in a standard café, either in the form of an entrance fee or through elevated drinks prices. But many judged the supplement worthwhile; the atmosphere was relaxed, the singers, though not first rate, were undeniably ‘of the people’, and unlike theatre-goers, audience members could also smoke. And as one guidebook writer exclaimed with surprise, ‘sometimes, one can actually hear quite good music.’20

  But most of the time, after a long day spent holding a pose, Maria simply wanted somewhere she could meet with like-minded individuals, a place where her aching limbs could relax and her mind would be inspired. In 1881, she found the perfect venue. It was a place where creative expression was not just permitted – it was positively encouraged.

  Rodolphe Salis was a tall, red-headed bohemian with a coppery beard and boundless charisma.21 He had tried and failed to make a success of several different careers, including painting decorations for a building in Calcutta.22 But by 1881 he was listless and creatively frustrated, uncertain where his niche might lie. More pressingly, he was desperate to secure a steady income. But then he had the ingenious idea to turn the studio which he rented, a disused post office on the resolutely working-class Boulevard de Rochechouart, into a cabaret with a quirky, artistic bent. He was not the first to attempt such a venture: La Grande Pinte on the Avenue Trudaine had been uniting artists and writers to discuss and give spontaneous performances for several years.23 But Salis was determined that his initiative would be different – and better. A fortuitous meeting ensured that it was.

  Poet Émile Goudeau was the founder of the alternative literary group the Hydropathes (‘water-haters’ – meaning that they preferred wine or beer). After meeting Goudeau in the Latin Quarter and attending a few of the group’s gatherings, Salis became convinced that a more deliberate form of entertainment than had been offered at La Grande Pinte would create a venue that was truly innovative – and profitable.24 The Hydropathe members needed a new meeting place, and so Salis persuaded Goudeau to rally his comrades and convince them to relocate from the Latin Quarter to his new cabaret artistique. They would be able to drink, smoke, talk and showcase their talents and their wit. Targeting an established group like the Hydropathes was a stroke of genius on Salis’s part. Baptising his cabaret Le Chat Noir after the eponymous feline of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, he made certain that his ready-made clientele were not disappointed.

  Everything about the ambience and the decor reflected Salis’s unconventional, anti-establishment approach, an ethos which the Hydropathes shared. A seemingly elongated room with low ceilings was divided in two by a curtain.25 The front section was larger and housed a bar for standard customers. But the back part of the room (referred to as ‘L’Institut’) was reserved exclusively for artists. Fiercely proud of his locality, Salis was adamant that he could make Montmartre glorious. ‘What is Montmartre?’ Salis famously asked. ‘Nothing. What should it be? Everything!’26 Accordingly, Salis invited artists from the area to decorate the venue. Adolphe Léon Willette painted stained-glass panels for the windows, while Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen created posters. And all around, a disorientating mishmash of antiques and bric-a-brac gave the place a higgledy-piggledy feel. There was Louis XIII furniture, tapestries and armour alongside rusty swords; there were stags’ heads and wooden statues nestled beside coats of arms. It was weird, it was wonderful and it was utterly bizarre – the customers loved it.

  Salis was outrageously mean when it came to paying his staff, but with his customers he was the perfect gentleman cabaretier.27 A smooth talker, he made a point of welcoming guests with gushing hyperbole. Patrons were not ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ but ‘Monseigneur’ or ‘Your Highness’, and were greeted with a bow.28 A consummate showman, Salis soon had artists, writers, poets, journalists, actors, singers and their associates pouring through the doors of his unlikely studio. Maria was one of them.

  Her drinking companions included budding talent from the musical world, such as Paul Verlaine, Claude Debussy, Charles Gounod and Yvette Guilbert.29 There were artists, some established, many up-and-coming: Édouard Manet, a certain Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rivière, Willette, Steinlen and Caran d’Ache. And a person could guarantee that they would meet with writers, for Salis’s guests included such names as Jean Lorrain, Léon Bloy, Maurice Donnay, Jean Richepin, Jules Renard, Maurice Rollinat, Jules Jouy, Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo and Alphonse Allais. There were also statesmen like Léon Gambetta, and actresses, notably Sarah Bernhardt.

  On a typical evening, guests were greeted at the door by a Swiss guard, brilliantly adorned in full uniform, complete with halberd, who had the professed mission of ushering in poets and painters while expelling members of the clergy and the military.
30 Tables were then served by waiters disguised as academicians. Once equipped with a drink (distinctly mediocre wine in the early days, or Salis’s famous beer, ‘hydromel’), visitors could take a seat at one of the oaken benches and while away an evening in the dimly lit, smoky tavern, drinking, laughing, chatting and joining in raucously with familiar old songs while someone accompanied on a guitar or violin.31 There were recitals and performances of all kinds, and sometimes even a shadow show. Friday evenings were wildly popular.

  Salis made the extraordinary both his raison d’être and his selling point. The bourgeoisie eyed the cabaret and the image of bohemian life it projected with bemused curiosity; the proprietor made sure that ferrets of eccentricity were never disappointed. Salis made a flamboyant show of subverting convention wherever possible, and his militant rejection of modernity in favour of a childlike wonder at the absurd found a sympathetic following in Montmartre. Little could rival Salis’s charisma – save perhaps the stage presence of one of his performers, a square-jawed singer named Aristide Bruant, who took the stage with a flourish wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, cape, scarlet scarf and boots.32 His lyrics about familiar perils of working-class life always drew an enthusiastic response.

  An 1881 press law laid the ground for a boom of humorous publications, and, ever the opportunist, early in 1882 Salis founded a journal with the same name as the cabaret.33 The proprietor turned to his artist and writer friends for amusing contributions to crystallise Le Chat Noir’s ethos and publicise its exploits, and their writings, poems and illustrations were paid in hospitality (for Salis was loath to part with money).

  Public hoaxes and practical jokes were wholeheartedly encouraged and the journal played an active part in these pranks; in April 1882, Le Chat Noir published news of Salis’s death.34 A sign was placed outside the tavern explaining that the premises were open for mourning, and inside, a cello case was concealed under a black cloth to imitate a coffin. Horrified mourners were invited to pay their respects and then console themselves with beer. On another occasion, a well-known actor from the Variétés was recognised by Salis’s clientele as he passed the tavern.35 Drinkers came rushing out into the street clutching props seized from the cabaret in order to serenade the star in a mock ceremonial worship, with Salis reverently kneeling to present the bewildered actor with an honorary beer in an antique vase.