by Baxter, John
“I could take them down rue Mazarine.”
Jules Mazarin was a seventeenth-century cardinal, a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu. He inherited his role as first minister of France, but also his hunger for beautiful objects. An obsessive collector, with a particular penchant for diamonds, he kept his collections in his palace, the gilded dome of which, now the Institut de France, sits at the foot of the street named for him, proof that, though you can’t take it with you, it’s possible to leave an elegant souvenir.
A walk down rue Mazarine gives a good sense of what’s going on in Paris’s art world. If you try it on any Thursday evening, you’ll find, particularly in summer, that a few galleries are hosting vernissages. Generally they don’t mind if you wander in, accept a glass of wine, and eavesdrop on the conversation. If they do look askance, simply ask to see the price list. Even the hint of a sale makes the thorniest gallerist more amiable.
Though a few run to a second floor, most galleries are shoeboxes. You enter sideways and peer at the paintings with your nose almost touching the canvas. And the art? Expect to be bewildered, by variety if not talent. Abstracts by an unknown Rumanian follow canvases by a Spaniard who paints only rearing horses straddled by nude males. Tucked into a cobbled courtyard, a gallery shows some Jean Cocteau drawings a little too Cocteauesque to be believable. Opposite is a shop filled with African masks and idols that haven’t traveled farther than a garage in Belleville.
Erotica once was the Montparnos’ hottest seller. In the 1920s, Pascin, Foujita, Kisling, and their colleagues pumped it out: on canvas for the carriage trade, but also as etchings and lithographs or expensively printed illustrated books with texts never meant to be read. Couturier Paul Poiret dressed the emancipated woman of the time in beautiful clothes so that Moïse Kisling could undress her to be painted.
To be painted nude was a badge of emancipation. The film star Arletty posed nude for Kisling. Man Ray, being American, and a natural entrepreneur, did a thriving under-the-counter trade in salacious photographs, often shot to order. For models, he used his own mistresses, like Kiki and Lee Miller, or the wives of friends, sometimes even an artist in her own right, such as Meret Oppenheim. Occasionally, Ray participated in person. Some things haven’t changed. Mazarine galleries often show flagrantly sexual images by photographers Nobuyoshi Araki or Kohei Yoshiyuki, or the collages of fetish artist Pierre Molinier, who enjoyed being photographed in black lingerie and high heels, with a long-stemmed rose up his rectum.
Sex played its part in one of my most vivid memories of art and rue Mazarine. Passing one summer morning, I found a gallery open, and a new show of photographs being hung. The photographer—call him Julian Templeton—was English. I knew his work, but it took a few moments to realize the gray-haired man in crumpled white linen was the artist himself.
Templeton’s trademark is soft-focus color photographs of teenage girls. Long-limbed, languid, and nude, bathed in golden light, they recline in haylofts or Provençal bedrooms furnished with Victorian china and bunches of violets. If lesbian activity had not recently taken place, it is about to. Licensing his images for use in everything from soap ads to jigsaw puzzles had made Templeton rich. But respectability is more elusive, so periodically he staged shows in Tokyo or Paris, where, unlike London, he didn’t risk being picketed by anti-pedophile protestors or shut down by the police.
For this exhibition, in a further appeal for acceptance, he’d included lithographs by other, earlier artists who’d also used young girls as models. I knew one of these images, of two girls coiled on a sofa in a clinging soixante-neuf, and was peering at it, trying to figure out if it was an original, when he joined me.
“Gerda Wegener,” I said. The Danish illustrator had been a sensation in 1920s Montparnasse, not least because of her unconventional lifestyle. Her husband Einar, who modeled for both her male and female figures, became one of the first men to undergo a successful surgical sex change.
One of Gerda Wegener’s erotic lithographs
“Yes! You’re an artist?”
“Writer.”
“A writer. How interesting. What might I have read of yours?”
Half an hour later, we were sitting on the terrace of a café on the Carrefour de Buci.
“I’ve been doing a little writing myself,” he said. “Nothing too ambitious. Just a few experiments. Would you mind casting a professional eye over them?”
“Well, of course. Just send them . . .”
“Oh, I have them here.” He produced a folder with some typed sheets.
I skimmed them. There was a lot about the dew on the mossy lip of the stream, a pearl nestling in its nacreous cup, the fawn bending shyly to sip. . .
“Erm . . .” Bypassing literary criticism, I went straight to the problems of publication. “Not easy to find a home for this kind of material. The market is nervous about anything so . . .” I scrambled for the suitable word. “ . . . specialized.”
“So I’ve found!” said Templeton. “No London publisher would even consider it. The British simply don’t understand such things. Do you know, there isn’t even a word in English for the kind of women I like?”
We ambled back to the gallery, where Templeton generously presented me with a copy of his memoirs, illustrated with more images of drowsing adolescents. He inscribed it, “To John Baxter, a member of the club.”
That night, Neil Pearson, actor and biliophile, came to dinner. He leafed through the book and raised his eyebrows at the dedication. I mentioned Templeton’s complaint about there being no word in English for girls of the kind who modeled for him.
“How about ‘children’?” Neil said.
Chapter 30
To Market
marché d’aligre
informations–fleurs
poissonniers–fruits
charcutiers–chalands*
fromager–fripes
caves–legumes
bouchers–balayage
aligre market
information–flowers
fishmongers–fruit
delicatessen–barges*
cheesemonger–old clothes
winery–vegetables
butchers–hair-coloring
SIGN AT ENTRANCE OF MARCHÉ D’ALIGRE
(*Chalands—“barges”—is slang for customers.)
Few pleasures are more satisfying than strolling through a French market on a sunny day, pausing to chat with the vendors, enjoying a sample of some particularly tempting fruit or vegetable, and lingering over your choice of the most succulent items on sale.
Just don’t expect this at Aligre.
One guidebook observes nervously of the market: “The diverse nature of this neighbourhood makes itself evident here.” I would put it more strongly. Aligre is a zoo, a battlefield, a shouting match, a souk. A clash of cultures. If the old market of Les Halles was “the guts of Paris,” this is the mouth, permanently agape, to taste and to bawl.
The heart of Aligre is an ancient roofed, stone-floored market with permanent shops selling cheese, meat, and fish at supermarket prices. Go there if you want, but to do so is to miss the real action on the square outside, where merchants sell cheap-but-cheery clothing, sunglasses, electrical goods, stockings. There’s a brocante too, a flea market offering the usual miscellany of discarded utensils, ancient magazines, collections of anonymous snapshots, prints, and posters, among which may be found a rarity, even a treasure.
But above all this is a market for food. Many of the clients are Muslims, since it’s the best inner-city source of halal meat, particularly lamb, but also chicken, preferred for slow cooking in tajines, and the thin merguez sausages of North Africa, deep red with paprika and chili. Restaurateurs shop here because a quarter sheep or a whole beef rump costs what a chichi butcher in the seizième would demand for a gigot or a kilo of entrecote.
Aligre’s butchers are masters of skills that big-city butchers no longer practice. They sell lamb’s kidneys, still embedded in the thick white
suet that makes delicious pastry, and whole beef kidneys, for braising with mustard or madeira. They expertly and uncomplainingly bone your shoulder of lamb to be stuffed and rolled; trim your entrecote, leaving just the right amount of fat to lubricate it on the grill; slice a veal shin in perfect rounds for osso bucco, or without meat for use as os à moelle—marrow bones. Baked dry until the marrow starts to deliquesce into fat, they’re served as an appetizer with coarse salt and thin dry toast.
Aligre is your one-stop market for anything to do with Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking: aubergines, courgettes, onions, carrots, garlic, tomatoes, coriander, basil, mint. The rule is, “Pile it high and sell it cheap.” Forget about buying just one aubergine or a couple of tomatoes; all prices are for a kilo or, more often, two, and as noon approaches, when the market closes, selling becomes frantic. “Three kilos for one!” they yell, hoping to clear their stock. “A dozen for a euro!” Bags are shoveled to overflowing with strawberries or chilis or baby potatoes. Unloading your purchases in the kitchen later, you gape at the quantities. How am I going to use up twenty baby aubergines or two pounds of ripe cherries—and why did I buy all that coriander? But it was just so cheap. . .
For a while, the Australian chef Jean-Claude Bruneteau ran his little restaurant the Bennelong just around the corner. I visited Aligre with him and watched as he stroked an aubergine like a woman’s cheek, weighed a fresh peach like a breast, ran his fingers through bunches of fresh parsley, marjoram, and tarragon as through a mane of hair. “I’ve never had such sweet strawberries,” he said, his voice vivid with delight. “Juicy pineapples, ripe bananas, ripe tomatoes. No hydroponic lettuce. Six kinds of butter to choose from. No margarine in sight. It’s food heaven here, really. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous food.”
Chapter 31
The Boulevard of Crime
A long boulevard, lined all the way with high, blank, very grim walls, darkened by the chestnut trees then newly planted, with very dim gas-lamps far distant one from the other. . . . Fifty yards behind my back, running footsteps sounded. . . . When they were very close, I ran like hell. But they gained and gained on me. And they gained. I stood at bay under a gas-lamp, beneath the black walls of the prison.
They emerged from the gloom—two men.
They ran on.
They were apaches all right; there were the casquettes with the visors right down over the eyes; the red woollen mufflers floated out, the jackets were skintight, the trousers ballooned out round the hips, and one of them had an open jack knife.
FORD MADOX FORD, A Mirror to France, 1926
While Hemingway enjoyed his cognac in La Coupole and the Fitzgeralds caroused at the Ritz, the boulevards seethed with larceny. It was only to the pampered intellos that Paris in the 1920s was indolent and tranquil. Just a few blocks from the lights of boulevard du Montparnasse, a different Paris began, which most tourists only glimpsed from the safety of a tour bus or read about in pulp novels featuring avengers like Fantomas and Judex who stalked the roofs of Paris in opera capes, top hats, and black domino masks.
Americans shrugged off the seedy side of Paris. It didn’t interest them that poules cruised Montparnasse outside the big cafés, that their mecs openly sold heroin and cocaine, known locally as chnouf, or that knifings and shootings took place every night. Thanks to Prohibition, the United States had more crime than it could handle. They preferred things that were rarer back home—sex, alcohol, and art.
To tourists from more disciplined nations, however, in particular Germany and Russia, crime was pornography, and they couldn’t get enough. In particular they admired the street gangsters known as apaches—to rhyme with “crash.” Why they adopted this name is obscure. They may have admired the stone-faced braves brought to Paris by Wild West shows like that of Buffalo Bill Cody. Another explanation traces the name to a newspaper report of a Montmartre brawl, where the journalist wrote, “The fury of a riotous incident between two men and a woman rose to the ferocity of savage Apache Indians in battle.”
Like all street gangs, les apaches took fancy names, conducted elaborate initiations, and affected a uniform. You knew an apache from his striped jersey, tight jacket, and flat peaked cap, tilted low over his eyes. A red wool sash served as a scarf in cold weather and doubled as a mask. In the 1932 film Love Me Tonight, Maurice Chevalier, a tailor passing himself off as a baron, puts on a similar outfit to sing the Rodgers and Hart song “Poor Apache.” His aristo hosts shiver in delight as he prances around the great hall, his shadow enormous on the wall, boasting, “The thing that makes me happy / Is to make a woman cry . . . When I take her wrist and twist it / No woman can resist it.” He calls his sweetheart “a shop girl” and “a treasure,” but in explaining that she makes him “a gentleman of leisure,” we’re meant to know she’s a whore and he is her pimp.
In 1901, two apache gang leaders, Leca and Manda, fought over such a girl, a teenage prostitute, Amélie Hélie, whose blond hair earned her the name Casque d’Or—“Golden Helmet.” Leca died, and Manda was guillotined in the yard of the Santé Prison. According to legend, Amélie watched her lover’s execution from one of the windows overlooking the prison that locals rented to ghoulish thrill-seekers. “Poor Apache” evokes their story. Chevalier assumes he will end on the guillotine but goes to his death with an insolent “Nuts!” to the executioner.
An apache, the Paris gangster of the 1900s
The story of Casque d’Or caught the popular imagination, particularly of wealthy Russians, who clamored for a glimpse of places where such crimes took place. The guides of Montparnasse were happy to oblige. “The Russians were conducted to faked apache dens,” reported one writer. “There were the red-aproned golden-casqued girls, and the sinister-looking apaches with caps drawn over their eyes. In the course of the dancing, a quarrel would break out. A duel with knives would be fought. The Grand Dukes had their money’s worth of thrills; and then the girls took off their aprons and the men donned respectable hats and went quietly home to bed.”
The 1917 Revolution swept away Russia’s aristocrats, depositing a few of them back in Paris, now as penurious waiters or doormen. Maybe they were the ones who suggested to their new employers that those faked shows still had some life in them. Cabarets adapted the knife fights into a tango called the “Apache.” A girl, dressed like a whore in black stockings and a slit skirt, lets herself be scorned, rejected, and flung around the stage by a mec in a striped jersey, a black beret, and a look of weary contempt. In “Poor Apache,” Lorenz Hart gave Chevalier a capsule description of such a performance, incorporating one of his clever rhymes.
While all the men are dancing
Tenderly romancing
I’ve got to throw her body around.
The part that no one dares touch
The spot that only chairs touch
Is frequently touching the ground.
Apache dances survived into the 1950s, long after anyone remembered their inspiration. Just after World War II, Ludwig Bemelmans, the Austrian American writer, best known for his Madeline books about a little Parisian schoolgirl, was taken by his friend Armand to Le Petit Balcon, a club on Passage Thiéré, near the Bastille.
The place was jammed. In the centre of the floor an apache was dancing wildly with his gigolette. What he was doing to the girl was mayhem. He twisted her, choked her, banged her head on the floor. Finally a man sitting nearby jumped up in fury. He rushed, knife in hand, at the apache—and there was a fight and blood flowed—a pool of it appeared on the floor. People screamed and ran. Outside, a bus, with American Express on it, waited for them.
“I own a share in this place,” said Armand as the “blood” was being mopped up. “It’s a gold mine. The next show starts in half an hour. The apache, the girl and the assassin are not allowed to speak to anybody, because none of them speaks a word of French. They’re two ex-GI’s and a girl who used to be with a USO troupe. They all stayed behind because they love Paris.”
Chapter 32
The Gates of Night
Enter, general of the armies of the night, at the head of your dreadful retinue.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX in his 1964 speech on the reburial in the Panthéon of resistance hero Jean Moulin
Bemelmans makes it seem amusing to have lived in Paris in those years after the war. Films like the 1951 An American in Paris reinforced the impression that the sun always shone, art flourished, and even poverty was the pretext for a joke and a song.
That idea doesn’t survive long once you begin to know France. For every American in Paris, there’s a film like Les Portes de la Nuit—The Gates of Night—so drenched in a sense of betrayal, despair, and shame that almost nobody in France could bear to watch. It almost destroyed the career of Marcel Carné, who, until then, had been the hero of French cinema for having made Les Enfants du Paradis under the occupation. Its most durable survival is the song “Feuilles Mortes”—“Autumn Leaves”—one of those hymns to despair for which the French and the Germans have no equal.
Even all these years later, the occupation is a subject best avoided. As the French say, “One shouldn’t talk of rope in the house of the hanged.” From time to time, however, some visitor will ask, often with a certain embarrassment, “What was it like under the Nazis?” I’ve taken historians on discreet tours of places in the sixth arrondissement that have associations with that time, but always with a sense of embarrassment, as if they’d asked me to recommend a reliable brothel.
Not long ago, the American Library asked me to interview Leslie Caron for its Evenings with an Author series (she’d just published a memoir). It was ironic that she’d been plucked from obscurity at nineteen to star opposite Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, since she’d barely lived through the war. As she describes in her book, she almost starved to death.
We were down to animal fodder: salsify, rutabagas, Jerusalem artichoke. . . . Fruit was as rare and expensive as tobacco. Children had one glass of milk a day. We were each given an ever-shrinking ration of butter; it eventually amounted to an egg-cup-ful per person, per week. By the end of the war, bread was down to one slice a day per person—two-thirds flour, one-third wood shavings. Meat was also extremely scarce: about two hundred grams a week each. Cats and dogs disappeared—they were stolen and eaten. As a pharmacist, my father received cocoa butter to make suppositories, and it became the substitute for butter and oil in our cooking. Everything at our table had a faint cocoa flavour.
