Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  I left and crossed the park toward the west, and began wandering down the rue de la Saïda until I noticed that it was intersected by the Passage de Dantzig. I paused there, because I had a faint memory of wanting to see something on the Passage de Dantzig.

  But the Passage de Dantzig didn’t look too promising. It was literally a back alley lined with heavy green garbage bins standing by the featureless backs of buildings. Still, I wandered past the garbage bins anyway toward some greenery that was spilling over a wall near the distant end of the Passage. And that’s where I found, at number 2, behind a tall, arched metal gate covered with ivy, the artists’ colony of considerable legend named La Ruche—the Hive—that is now more than 115 years old. The gate, of course, was locked. It was so entwined with ivy that it must have been decades since it was last opened. The real entrance was a metal door to the right of the gate, mounted between two thick stone pillars. The door to the building was also locked, and a brass plaque on the pillar to the left said that this was private property, where visitors were forbidden without prior authorization. I would have to make do with peering inside through the ivy on the gate—which I tried, although I couldn’t see much at all.

  La Ruche was founded by a sculptor named Alfred Boucher in 1902. In addition to his famous tower, Gustave Eiffel had also designed a metallic structure to exhibit wine during the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900. After the conclusion of the exhibition, Boucher rescued the materials and reassembled them as an art colony here, in what was then still a small village on the edge of Paris. The building was octagonal, three stories high, and domed, so it really did resemble a hive. Boucher also liked the name because it implied that the structure would be filled with feverish activity. This building was at the center of a large property that in time contained gardens, artists’ studios, and a theater that could seat an audience of three hundred. La Ruche was a success from the beginning. It has been the home to such artists and writers as Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Amedeo Modigliani, Constantin Brancusi, and Diego Rivera. There are several histories and memoirs concerning La Ruche. One of interest is by the painter Marie Vorobieff, known also as Marevna, who wrote about her time at La Ruche, where she became the lover of Diego Rivera, by whom she had a daughter. In 1970, it was announced that La Ruche would be torn down, but a committee of artists and arts patrons came to the rescue and managed to save it.

  I looked for several minutes at what little I could see through the ivy, and had turned to leave when I saw a group of about fifteen people walking down the Passage de Dantzig behind a stout, elderly woman who seemed to be in charge. I divined immediately that this was a walking tour about to visit La Ruche. What luck! I stood off to the side as the stout woman stopped at the metal door between two stone pillars and typed in a code she read from a piece of paper. The metal door opened, the group walked through, and no one objected when I walked into La Ruche with the tour. The grounds were a wild garden barely kept in its bed. Small sculptures, worn now by wind and rain, stood here and there amid roots and piles of rocks and staircases. One walkway led past a row of small brick buildings that doubled as studios and apartments. The doors to the hive itself were guarded by a pair of caryatids. Inside, a list of names showed that more than fifty artists were in residence. A winding wooden staircase led to the upper floors, where there were wedge-shaped apartments behind plain wooden doors. A calico cat followed us up the stairs. Everything was bright and clean and quiet, and we never saw a single person. The artists were either gone, sleeping in the afternoon, or hard at work. I prefer to presume the latter.

  I left La Ruche with the tour and then abandoned them, crossed back over the railroad tracks to the Fourteenth, and wandered toward my apartment. That’s how I came across the rue des Thermopyles. This narrow passageway seems more like a country lane than a Parisian street. It’s one of the rare streets still paved with cobblestones. Some of these had been dug up to do repairs on some pipes underneath, but the stones themselves were carefully stacked on the side, ready to be replaced. Wisteria hung from roofs and balconies, and must be beautiful when it blooms. At one place, a warren of rabbit hutches extended for ten yards or so along the north edge of the street. Handwritten signs in red and blue ink welcomed everyone to look, assured all that the rabbits were well fed and cared for, but implored passersby not to throw peanuts, bread, chocolate, onions, banana skins, citrus fruits, tomatoes, or mushrooms into the hutches, because they would make the rabbits sick. One sign also assured us, “The rats have left.” One house had doors through whose long windows, with their delicate lace curtains, I could see cats playing with balls of yarn beside a rocking chair. By the time I got back home, I had been gone almost five hours.

  One sunny, warm afternoon a few days later, I decided to take a walk down the rue Saint-Denis. The Billy Wilder film Irma la Douce, from 1963, in which Shirley MacLaine plays a prostitute, is set on an unnamed street in Paris that is exactly like the rue Saint-Denis in those days. It’s said that, in preparation for her role, Ms. MacLaine spent time in the neighborhood, observing the comings and goings of women on the street.

  Today the street is considerably less outré, although there are still a handful of sex shops on it. Their doorways are draped with filthy, heavy curtains. Inside, they sell a staggering variety of pornographic DVDs at deep discounts, but still no one wants to buy them. The best-selling item in these shops, advertised by large, hand-drawn signs on cardboard tacked on the wall beside the heavy curtains, seems to be poppers—amyl nitrite. A popper costs ten euros. Otherwise, the street is dominated by pizza parlors, crêperies, and stores selling medium-priced, multicolored, exotic women’s clothes. Their customers are either African women or goth chicks. In the store windows you see lots of black spiked high heels as well as black spiked heavy combat boots. But as I wandered toward the north end of Saint-Denis, an immensely fat woman in a black leather miniskirt waved at me. She was standing next to a doorway covered by an iron gate, and gestured toward the doorway while rolling her eyes in invitation. Le racolage—soliciting—is against the law in France. Neither a woman nor a man may solicit either actively, by calling to passersby, or passively, by gesturing and winking, but there are certain streets in certain neighborhoods in Paris where prostitution has been present for generations and streetwalkers can offer themselves with impunity.

  One of these neighborhoods is the crazy patchwork of streets just south of the Strasbourg–Saint-Denis Métro stop, where there were so many women standing by and in doorways that I felt I had entered some alternate reality. Most of the women were obese, like the woman who’d first gestured to me. I saw one grinning, muscular young man who looked like a construction worker taking the hand of a huge woman who was wearing nothing but tall black boots and a red sweater pulled down just enough to barely cover her massive behind. The two were happily going off to wherever she had her crib. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, especially but not entirely along the rue Blondel, there were women standing in doorways or just on the street. Sometimes two or three women sat on stools in doorways with their skirts pulled up and their legs spread.

  Who were their customers? I couldn’t imagine, although the muscular young man who walked off holding the hand of the fat woman in the red sweater looked like a man who could have bought, or even attracted, a woman who was not grossly fat and working on the street. It fleetingly—only fleetingly—crossed my mind that perhaps he knew something that I didn’t. I stifled that thought quickly.

  Up ahead of me, near the corner of Blondel and Saint-Denis, I was surprised to see the back of a slender, stylish woman who seemed to be different from the rest. She wore black heels, black hose, a tailored wool skirt that wasn’t too short, and a smart double-breasted jacket. From behind, she looked as if she would not be out of place working in a store that sold expensive luxury goods. But then she turned toward me, and I saw the desperate, j
oyless expression on her ruined face.

  Back on Saint-Denis, I saw a woman working the street who confounded everything else I’d seen. She seemed to live in a separate universe, where prostitution was both exhilarating and immensely profitable. When she appeared out of nowhere, the other women on the street all gathered about to greet her. They fell into long, animated conversations. This woman was tall and slender. Her blond hair was beautifully styled, and although the temperature was almost seventy, she wore a full-length mink coat. She was walking a small dog on a leash. She had a retro elegance and extravagance, like a spoiled glamour queen of the 1950s. Soon she walked on, leaving a gaggle of streetwalkers in her wake.

  France outlawed brothels in 1946, and 195 such establishments were shut down in Paris. Some—like Le Marguery, on the Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle—were so elegant that their interiors are still preserved today. Fine “maisons closes” and exclusive procuresses may exist today—there must certainly be ways for Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs to hire expensive women in Paris—but if so, their secrets are closely guarded. Instead, those 195 brothels that existed in 1946 have been replaced by Asian massage parlors. They seem to have metastasized in the past five or six years. There is hardly a block in Paris without one. Sometimes they face each other across the street, which suggests to me that there must be rival gangs that run them, although from the outside they all look alike. I have wandered many hours around Paris, and during all that time I have never once seen a customer go into or come out of an Asian massage parlor. But, obviously, men do enter sometimes, or there wouldn’t be so many spas. One time, however, I happened to walk by a parlor where a masseuse was smoking a cigarette in the doorway. She was wearing a leopard-print miniskirt. As I passed by, she looked directly into my eyes with cold contempt.

  From time to time, I would see aggressively elegant women on Paris streets, although the most elegant person I saw was someone I’m not sure was a woman. I saw her or him or them in the Fourteenth Arrondissement. She—I’ll say “she” since that is how she presents herself—wears the most expensive clothes, including hose, gloves, and shoes, and her blond hair is combed elaborately up and back across her head. Simply getting dressed and made up must take her at least an hour. I saw her often in 2016, and three years later I saw her again, but only once. She was on a street in the Fourteenth, walking hand in hand with a short, younger man. She was wearing tight black leather pants and black shoes with tall, narrow heels. Her legs were so thin they looked like straws covered in shiny leather.

  And, only a few moments later, I saw the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen while I was walking nearby, along the rue Delambre. I was pondering what I was going to buy at the grocery store and wasn’t on the alert to look for anything special. Since she was dressed in ordinary jeans, a simple white blouse, and white sneakers, it was as if she were venturing out into Paris incognito. I noticed her face more or less by chance and felt my stomach tighten a little, but she had already passed me before I realized how beautiful she was. I turned to look as she walked on down the sidewalk. She was slender and graceful, but from behind she was no different from many other young women. It was her face that was so beautiful. Who could she be? Her clothes seemed willfully anonymous, almost like a disguise, which made me think later that she really must be someone famous. Seeing her reminded me of both the shock and the pleasure the first time I saw Tracy, in the doorway to my office. I felt a slight, pleasant vibration that continued during the time I spent in the grocery, buying coffee, yogurt, and butter with grains of sea salt.

  * * *

  . . .

  The longer I stayed in Paris, the longer my walks became. After tramping back and forth across the Butte aux Cailles, just southwest of the Place d’Italie, to see all the burgeoning street art, I wandered slowly north, all the way across Paris, to the Parc de la Villette, nourished along the way by a Vietnamese lunch at Pho Nam Bo, on the rue Baudricourt. Another day, I began at Montmartre, far in the north, and zigzagged all the way to the southern border of Paris, where at dusk I rested with a small bottle of white wine on a bench by a pond in the peaceful Parc Montsouris. I reflected on the odd whims of fortune that had led me by the rue de Tracy, just one block long in the Second Arrondissement, between Saint-Denis and the Boulevard de Sébastopol. Slowly, I once again traversed the Parc Monceau, lingering by the monuments to Maupassant and Chopin, the verdant pond partially lined with faux classical columns, the odd miniature Egyptian pyramid, and the plaque honoring Jacques Garnerin. On October 22, 1797, he rose in a balloon to three thousand feet over the Parc Monceau, cut the rope that connected him to the balloon, and, in the world’s first parachute jump, descended slowly back down to the park, landing shaken but unharmed. From there, I followed the Avenue Hoche down to L’Étoile, and then kept going south across the river to the Champ de Mars in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. During these walks and many others, although I had little to show afterward but swollen ankles, I always felt that I was accomplishing something, that I was busy, and that I was using my time wisely.

  On Christmas 2015, before I left for Paris, my family had given me a professional-level camera that was still small enough to fit in the front pocket of my trousers. I always had it with me as I wandered. Back at my apartment, I would load the photographs from the camera into my computer. I began writing accounts of my wanderings, illustrated with photographs, and sending them to my family and friends, including my teacher at the Sorbonne in 2014, whose husband was the comic poet. In her response, she suggested that I read Le Piéton de Paris by Léon-Paul Fargue. This title in English—The Pedestrian of Paris—sounds considerably more mundane than it does in French, but I embraced the book from the moment I started reading it. These essays, which were first published between 1932 and 1936, are based on Fargue’s restless walking around Paris at night, in much the same way I was walking around Paris now during the day.

  Fargue had the advantage of being born in Paris in 1876 and of living there all his life until his death in 1947. He knew the city in intimate detail, through many years of experience, in a way I never can. But I felt I could aspire to his openness, his attitude, and his eye. “Myself, I am called by the secret places,” he wrote in his introduction to Le Piéton, “also by the shadows, the sorrows, the premonitions, the smothered footsteps, the sorrows that wait behind doors, the passage of ghosts; and by the memories of old windows, of spaces, of missteps, of reflections, and of ashes of memory.”

  Fargue’s obsessive wandering across Paris during the night was well known, and tolerated, even honored, among his friends. They knew that when he agreed to meet them for dinner he would inevitably be late, possibly hours late. He was such good company that the wait was worth it. He was a respected Symbolist poet himself and knew all the poets, novelists, painters, and composers of his day, as well as the aristocrats, society figures, and great beauties. He once had a dinner party with only two guests—Marcel Proust and James Joyce. It was the only time the two writers met.

  Fargue also had his Boswell: a writer named André Beucler, a Russian noble who fled the Revolution when he was twenty and lived in Paris for the rest of his life. In Beucler’s Vingt Ans avec Léon-Paul Fargue—the English translation is called The Last of the Bohemians—I found a quote from Fargue that delighted me so much that I printed it out in bold letters and taped it to the door of my office at the university. Fargue was interviewed by a Scandinavian woman who asked him about his ideas, and in particular his ideas about politics and society. He answered, “I love cats and ears, courtyards, chimneys, warm cafés on rainy days; I love folk art, the quays, cheeses, pianos, dead-end streets, wagons, does, frogs, and the beyond. So, there are my guiding principles. Ideas?! They are for the mediocre.” The juxtaposition of cats and ears is inspired, and the rest of his list is like an inventory of Paris, assuming that does and frogs are slang for certain kinds of people one sees on the streets, possibly prostitutes and petty criminals. Unf
ortunately, in 1943, during the Occupation, while dining with Picasso, he was struck with hemiplegia, paralysis of one-half of his body. He survived, but he was paralyzed and forced to spend the last four years of his life bedridden, a cruel fate for an inveterate wanderer.

  In reading about Fargue, I saw references to “la flânerie,” which means wandering the streets of a city without a goal but open to whatever experiences might occur. The person who does this is a “flâneur.” Wandering without a goal—wasn’t that exactly what I was doing? I was so pleased to learn that flâneurs were a Parisian tradition, and a well-established and highly regarded literary tradition at that. Balzac—or should I say Balzac?—wrote: “The majority of men walk about Paris as they eat, as they live, without thinking about it….Oh, to wander about Paris! Precious and delicious existence! To flâneur is a science, it is gastronomy of the eye. To merely walk is to vegetate; to flâneur is to live.” Baudelaire considered the flâneur to be a highly evolved personage, as can be seen in my epigraph. He also wrote that for “the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it is an immense joy to elect to reside among the many…to be outside your residence and still feel everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world and remain hidden in the world, such are some of the smaller pleasures of the independent spirits.” He compared the flâneur “to a kaleidoscope given conscience, which with each of its movements presents life multiplied.”