by Baxter, John
The path wound through and around the ancient workings. Sandstone isn’t granite, and if you quarry too much in any one place it caves in, forming cloches—bells, conical domes fifty feet high. Sometimes the householders above only knew that mining was taking place below them when a pit opened and a house dropped out of sight. We passed through half a dozen of these natural domes and, protected from a nasty fall by a flimsy handrail, looked down on a hollow where a natural spring had been turned into a foot bath. Filtered through meters of rock, the water was colorless as air. Apparently some stonecutters, accustomed to murkier water, feared to wash in it. Anything so insubstantial was unnatural, likely cursed.
The public entrance was only one of hundreds. If you knew the right manholes, you could get in from anywhere under this part of Paris. Above the graffito “1786,” a more recent visitor had added “1968” and the trefoil of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The catacombs attracted thrill seekers, devil worshippers, and plotters. It was here that the Marquis de Lafayette schemed to form a private army and sail to the aid of George Washington and the American rebels. The Resistance met here during World War II to plot sabotage of the occupying Nazis. Illegal parties were a tradition almost as old as the tunnels themselves. Modern geology students use them to celebrate their graduation. So did doctors; one manhole conveniently opened in a courtyard of a nearby hospital.
The official route led us back to another serpentine staircase and the welcome air and space of Denfert-Rochereau.
“We could go somewhere else next week.” Hugo said with the eagerness of a kid on Halloween proposing some fresh infantile outrage. “I know lotsa good places.”
“Like?”
“The sewers?”
Chapter 26
Heaven and Hell
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!
INTRODUCTION OF THE 1930S RADIO SERIAL The Shadow
I never took up Hugo’s invitation to tour les égouts. As I found out later, one couldn’t anyway, and hadn’t been able to since the 1970s. Up until then, husky employees of the system would haul visitors in boats. After that, they rode in carts attached to the wall, and then open carriages drawn by a small locomotive, but even that’s disappeared, along with the pretext of a tour. Instead, an abandoned part of the system under the Quai d’Orsay became the Paris Sewer Museum. You can inspect sanitized and artfully lit tunnels and in one’s imagination at least reenact Jean Valjean’s flight from Javert in Les Misérables.
Exhibits like this didn’t lack visitors. The gothic novels of the eighteenth century gave rise to legends about devil worship in ancient crypts and nuns held prisoner by lubricious priests. The earliest tourists, particularly from the United States, arrived with the conviction that the Paris beneath their feet was inhabited by ghouls, grave robbers, and devil worshippers who roamed catacombs lined with bones, and that a hidden lake existed under the Paris Opera on which a malevolent musical genius poled himself, snatching the occasional straying soprano and carrying her to his lair.
Never slow to see a profit, cabarets in Montmartre and Montparnasse transformed themselves into nightclubs with fanciful names—The End of the World, The Dead Rat, The White Wolf, The Mad Cow. “Ghost show cabarets” flourished. A favorite was Le Cabaret du Néant, the Cabaret of Nothingness. As you entered, a voice boomed “Welcome, O weary wanderer, to the realm of death! Enter, choose your coffin, and be seated beside it.” In the main bar, or salle d’intoxication, you sat at tables shaped like coffins, under chandeliers of human bones, while waiters dressed in the uniform of undertakers, with frock coats and top hats, brought you your drinks. Punters were then ushered into a narrow crypt, the “Room of Disintegration,” and seated on narrow benches in the semidark. At the far end, an upright coffin contained the body of an apparently dead young woman, wrapped in a shroud. The lights dimmed. . .
Cabaret du Néant—the Cabaret of Nothingness
Her face slowly became white and rigid; her eyes sank; her lips tightened across her teeth; her cheeks took on the hollowness of death—she was dead. But it did not end with that. From white the face slowly grew more livid . . . then purplish-black. . . . The eyes visibly shrank into their greenish-yellow sockets. . . . Slowly the hair fell away. . . . The nose melted away into a purple putrid spot. The whole face became a semi-liquid mass of corruption. Presently all this had disappeared, and a gleaming skull showed where so recently had been the handsome face of a woman.
Anyone who knew theater would have recognized Pepper’s Ghost, which used carefully lighted and angled sheets of glass to create the illusion of a phantom. But most visitors were so impressed they contributed generously to the man who stood at the exit with an upturned skull, into which you were encouraged to drop a few coins of appreciation.
The prize for showmanship, however, went to twin establishments in Montmartre called Le Ciel (heaven) and L’Enfer (hell). Guides explained that the two enterprises, though sharing the same building, were run by different men—L’Enfer by a known criminal, and Le Ciel by a former crook who’d Seen the Light. Of course the same person owned both, the devils of one doubling as angels next door. Molded plasterwork decorated both frontages. For heaven, which promised “art and fun,” a girl sat on a crescent moon being adored by a lover, while the door to hell took the form of a gaping mouth with goggling eyes and bared teeth. The doorman of hell was a devil with a pitchfork; for heaven, Saint Peter, a bearded giant holding a key as tall as himself.
Entrance to the Cabaret d’Enfer—the Cabaret of Hell
Like all such shows, L’Enfer lectured new arrivals to put them in the correct state of mind. As they stepped inside the yawning mouth, the devil greeted them with “Enter, dear damned!” If there were women, it continued, “Come on, lovely impure ones. Take a seat, charming sinners. You will be roasted on both sides.”
They sat at tables lit with red and green light, under statues showing souls writhing in hell, and gave their drinks orders to one of the imps who stood about with what looked like red-hot irons, with which they poked the clients. A black coffee with a cognac on the side became “A bumper of molten sins, with a dash of brimstone intensifier” and was served with a warning: “This will season your intestines, and render them invulnerable, for a time at least, to the tortures of the melted iron that will be soon poured down your throats.” While waiting for damnation, they were entertained by, according to the program, “diabolical attractions, including the tortures of the damned, and the furnace.” One of these was a pot in which two musicians, supposedly simmering for three thousand years, found the energy to play on a guitar and a mandolin.
Le Ciel, less seductive at first glance, placed you at a long table with men in ecclesiastical costume who offered “divine service, and sermon by the most humorous preacher in Paris.” It became more interesting with “the monk’s dream. Illustrated by tableaux vivants of the lusts of the flesh.” After this, clients were invited to the first floor to enjoy “suave visions of celestial bliss, acrobatics by angels in the clouds. Metamorphosis of a lady spectator into an angel. (Safe return to former condition ensured.) Interesting experiments made with the assistance of gentlemen from the audience. Visions of Mahometan Paradise and oriental ecstasy.”
Celestial bliss and oriental ecstasy—if only I could promise that to my walking clients. But it sounded like a tall order for just one person. As for spectators being made to disappear and reappear, for the moment, it’d be enough if my clients didn’t follow those of Professor Andrew and simply melt away. I’d been lucky once. But a convenient opium pipe would not come along every day, and my stock of stories about Parisian vice and depravity would soon run dry. Some serious thought would be needed.
Chapter 27
Blue Hour Blues
I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day, what else can change your ideas and make them run on a differ
ent plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
On the afternoon of my last walk for the seminar, I found myself not far from where I’d abandoned Hugo after our visit to the catacombs, at the intersection of boulevard du Montparnasse and the boulevard Saint-Michel. A current of nostalgia more powerful than the brisk rain-filled wind carried me across the street to shelter behind the hedges of the leafily secluded Closerie des Lilas.
The lunch crowd had gone home, and a few waiters were moving around the restaurant, setting tables for dinner. I turned left, past the grand piano where, in an hour, a pianist would be trifling with a repertoire of the Gershwins, Cole Porter, and Edith Piaf, and into the back bar.
A small brass plate inlaid in each table identifies a famous drinker who, in the golden days of the 1920s, could be found at this table or, occasionally, under it. Mine read MAN RAY—coincidentally the perfect choice, since Ray lived nearby, on rue du Val-de-Grâce, when he painted A l’Heure de l’Observatoire, les Amoureux, his image of a woman’s red lips, big as an airship, floating over the dome of the observatory, just a block or two away.
I had the place almost to myself. Even the bar was untended. Two lovers cuddled in a corner, so entwined they appeared to have fused into a single entity. A lone drinker, slumped behind a cloudy yellow pastis, occupied the table I’d have preferred—the one with the brass plate reading ERNEST HEMINGWAY (better spelled than those for “Samuel Becket” and “Pierre Louis.”)
Anglo-Saxon and Latin societies differ in their attitudes to the late afternoon. The English-speaking world assigns this time to the rush hour, drive time, or happy hour—a period to be blanked out, best forgotten, consigned to oblivion by boredom or booze, or the car radio tuned to the blur of back-to-back golden oldies. As Scott Fitzgerald said of Sunday in Hollywood, “not a day, but a gap between two other days.”
In Italy, Spain, and France, a different reality obtains. In these countries, the evening hours between five and seven exist in a separate zone where time appears no longer to move, but hangs suspended, as the French say, entre chien et loup—between dog and wolf. Paris in particular welcomes the moment and wraps it in mythology and magic. For lovers, le cinq à sept is shorthand for that time they steal to be together—the hiatus between when one leaves work and the moment, two hours later, that one arrives home—if married, to eat with the family; if single, to feed the cat, mix a drink, take a bath, and remember.
Photographers and cinematographers call this time, particularly in late summer, “the magic hour.” Sunlight, striking obliquely, and softened by longer progress through the air, is at its most flattering. Actresses have been known to throw after-lunch tantrums, develop headaches, or lock themselves in their caravans, only to recover and emerge, ready for their close-up, as the clock strikes five. Painters and poets prefer it in autumn, when the sky over Paris becomes a study in gray and rose, an invitation to melancholy. It inspired one of Verlaine’s most famous poems, “Chanson d’Automne”:
The long sighs
Of the violins
Of autumn
Wound my heart
With monotonous languor.
It is also the time when perfumiers gather flowers, knowing their scent will be at its most powerful. Guerlain, having created a heady mixture of rose, iris, jasmine, vanilla, and musk, gave it the name by which this time is traditionally known, L’Heure Bleue—the blue hour.
Paris has inspired the world’s saddest stories, and l’heure bleue more than its share, including Babylon Revisited, Fitzgerald’s pastel sketch of the autumnal city as seen through the eyes of an expatriate who returns after having drunk away his money, his family, and his work.
Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank. Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l’Opéra, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade.
Charlie returns in the hope of retrieving his child. It’s certain he’ll fail, since failure is the only thing for which he’s shown an aptitude. We also know he will go back to the bottle, as did Fitzgerald himself. For some writers, drink is not an escape but a career.
It’s said that anything true written about Hollywood in the 1970s must acknowledge the importance of cocaine. Expatriate Paris in the 1920s only makes sense if we recognize the centrality of booze.
The Volstead Act of 1920 made it illegal to sell alcohol in the United States. Not in Europe, of course. “To a certain class of American,” wrote Jimmie Charters, barman at the Dingo and the Jockey in Montparnasse, and later at Harry’s Bar across the river, next to the Opéra, “drinking in excess became an obligation. No party was a success without complete intoxication of the guests.”
For Paris’s restaurateurs and barmen, booze was a bonanza. Before 1920, the French had barely heard of cocktails. They drank wine or beer, aperitifs before dinner, and digestifs afterward. Prohibition changed that. Cafés reopened as bars américains, with barmen, usually African Americans who had stayed on after the war, serving martinis, old-fashioneds, and whiskey sours. “Cocktails! That is the real discovery of our age,” wrote Sisley Huddlestone, correspondent of the London Times, in 1928, when he interviewed one of the most popular painters in Montparnasse.
[Kees] van Dongen, the most Parisian of Dutch painters, whom I remember as a struggling, not to say starving artist in Montparnasse, but who has now become a rich portraitist holding eccentric but fashionable midnight parties, stroked his big blond beard, reflected a moment and then with a twinkle in his eye delivered his epigram. “Our epoch,” he said, “is the cocktail epoch. Cocktails! They are of all colours. They contain something of everything. No, I do not mean merely the cocktails one drinks. They are symbolic of the rest. The modern society woman is a cocktail. She is a bright mixture. Society itself is a bright mixture. You can blend people of all tastes and classes. The cocktail epoch!”
Paris was one big and boozy party. Paul Morand in 1930 noticed the popularity of the Saltrates Rodell, a patented foot bath, perfect for soaking your aching soles after a night of dancing the Charleston.
For café owners, the investment more than paid off. Foreigners liked to drink early, in the late afternoon, when French customers were still at work and the cafés would normally be empty. They also ate early, unlike the French, who seldom sat down before nine. Above all, they possessed unquenchable thirsts. The French drank for pleasure and relaxation; the Americans, the Spaniards, and the Germans did so to get drunk. Ordering expensive mixed drinks or champagne, they sluiced them down, and demanded more, paying so readily they seldom noticed how flagrantly they were overcharged or shortchanged.
Even the most staid American visitor thought it a duty, on arriving in Paris, to get good and plastered (or squiffy, ginned, edged, jingled, potted, hooted, tanked, crocked, embalmed, lit like Macy’s window, fried to the hat, or any one of sixty other synonyms helpfully listed by a 1927 guidebook). Young journalist Waverley Root, arriving to take a job on the Herald Tribune’s Paris edition, ordered a bottle of Bordeaux with his first meal on French soil. The waiter didn’t explain that even the French don’t drink with breakfast. Why would he? Business was business.
The likelihood that everyone was permanently drunk accounts for the joyous Paris of the 1920s as described in postwar memoirs like Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, and a
bove all Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Contemporary descriptions are nowhere near as enthusiastic. They make those famous bars sound squalid. The Dingo, where Hemingway and Fitzgerald first met, was small, noisy, and noted for the eccentricity of its clients: “dingo” was a corruption of dingue—crazy. Explaining why he called his memoirs This Must Be the Place, its barman, Jimmie Charters, recalled:
I remember one time walking from the Dôme to the Dingo. Ten feet or so ahead of me was Flossie Martin. As she came abreast of the bar entrance, a handsome Rolls Royce drove up to the curb and from it stepped two lavishly dressed ladies. For a moment they hesitated. They looked at the Dingo questioningly. They peered in the windows between the curtains.
Flossie, seeing them, looked her contempt. As she passed into the bar she tossed a single phrase over her shoulder.
“You bitch!”
Whereupon the lady so addressed nudged her companion anxiously.
“Come on, Helen,” she said. “This must be the place!”
One guidebook called the Jockey “indescribable.” It had “low, cracked ceilings and the tattered walls covered with posters. Cartoons painted with shoe polish.” Harry’s was a dingy tourist trap where they watered the liquor and stole your change. As if it wasn’t already sufficiently déclassé, in 1924 it launched the International Bar Flies association. For $1, members got a badge—two flies in top hats, buzzing at one another—and were taught the code of recognition. “Flick a member on the left shoulder as if a fly were there, give him the grip which is natural to all I.B.Fs— the right hand extended as if holding a glass of whiskey, the right foot raised the height of a bar rail—and buzz.”
All the same, drunks like Scott Fitzgerald became maudlin when they recalled barmen who, with the sun barely above the horizon, would prepare an eye-opener to numb the effects of a hangover. Compliments might have been fewer had the drinkers known how they were being exploited. Jimmie Charters confessed in his memoirs (for which Hemingway wrote an introduction) that his salary was the smallest part of his income.
