Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  Natalie Clifford Barney

  The twentieth century. Existentialism! Replaced by structuralism, deconstruction, Marxist criticism, Lacanianism, communism: Something of the local spirit of debate still seems to be alive that flourished with the scholastics and abbots of centuries ago, and the sixth arrondissement still claims to be its home, damped down during the two wars, to be sure. France suffered horribly in the first war, when it lost a sizable proportion of its young men. Many Americans stayed in Paris throughout that war—Edith Wharton, for example. Wharton, the American novelist, had spent most of her adult life in Europe. Now she worked herself to exhaustion and spent much of her own fortune organizing hostels for refugees, shelters for Belgian orphans of war, sewing enterprises to provide clothes to and earn money for the war effort, and after the war got the Légion d’Honneur, the prestigious decoration, for her service.

  After the war, people reacted with the gaiety reflected in the expatriates living on the French Riviera in the twenties (as in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night). Paris offered two things it had always offered, sexual freedom and drink, both in short supply at home. Americans who had always come to France for culture and clothes, now came for the wine, too, and apparently they have always come as sexual tourists. But the effects of Prohibition shouldn’t be overlooked, especially among American men of letters who were or would become alcoholics—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, to name a few who came to France and lived in St.-Germain-des-Prés.

  To talk of the sexual freedom of those days, something of history may explain the climate for women in St.-Germain in the 1920s, when expatrate lesbians had a sort of colony or social circle centered on Rue Jacob. It goes back, as I’ve suggested, to Queen Margot, and no doubt before: By the time the historical Marguerite (like Dumas’s fictional one) was married to Henri of Navarre, she had been the mistress of a leading Catholic courtier, Henri de Guise, and before that of the Vicomte de Martigues, for several years, without particular detriment to her future. This seems to imply considerably greater sexual freedom for women, at least royal women, in the sixteenth century than would be the case later, though the rules were already changing, and had a setback under the sway of the Huguenots, when Parisian brothels were briefly closed.

  Sexual freedom was allied to power, of course. Margot’s mother effectively ruled France, as people said that Diane de Poitiers had done earlier. Queen Margot, her mother, and other royal women of her time, had, relative to later generations, a lot of power and status, as long as they didn’t impinge too much on masculine prerogatives. My impression is that this could still describe the position of women in France: high, higher than in Anglo-Saxon countries—but not high enough seriously to challenge masculine prerogatives. And it also seems that French women of the seventeenth century had more freedom and more power than they would later. Catherine de Médicis, however, thought the days of her own youth were even better.

  Queen Margot tells one story about a discussion with her mother on the subject of women’s freedom. It has come up because evil intriguers, trying to stir up trouble between Margot and her husband, arrange for it to appear that she is improperly visiting a man; her carriage is parked outside his house, to be seen by her husband Henri as he and King Henri III drive by. “My carriage was easily to be distinguished, as it was gilt and lined with yellow velvet trimmed with silver.”

  Her husband Henri (because her husband was King of Navarre when they married, Queen Margot in her memoirs is obliged to refer to him as “the King my husband,” to distinguish him from “the King my brother”) is not upset, but Queen Margot’s mother, Catherine de Médicis, gives her hell anyway when she hears about the outing, until she is reassured that there was nothing improper in Queen Margot’s behavior; then she apologizes for her hasty condemnation of her daughter: “In my younger days,” said she, “we were allowed to converse freely with all the gentlemen who belonged to the King our father, the Dauphin, and Monsieur d’Orleans, your uncles.” It was normal for them to assemble in the bedchambers of court women, and nothing was thought of it. “Neither ought it to appear strange that Bussi sees my daughter in the presence of her husband’s servants…. You are unfortunate to live in these times.” Then she and her friends reminisce about “the pleasures and innocent freedoms of the times they had seen, when scandal and malevolence were unknown at Court.”

  What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The man, Bussy d’Amboise, later was rumored as Queen Margot’s lover, and/or that of Madame de Sauves—and that of Margot’s brother Henri, too. It’s certain that the lot of a queen was not easy. Just as her mother Catherine had to put up with her husband’s mistresses, including the fabled Diane de Poitiers, so did Queen Margot have to hold her tongue at Henri IV’s constant affairs. But at least she had plenty of her own. Is it too much to believe that these powerful seventeenth-century Frenchwomen were the real ancestresses of notable women of our day, say, Simone de Beauvoir or Adrienne Monniers? Such geneologies are always a little facile, but the idea is defensible.

  Janet Flanner and Ernest Hemingway in Les Deux Magots during WWII

  But to return to the elegant lesbians of the twenties, a friend of mine was taken by Janet Flanner to meet Natalie Clifford Barney, who, having come to Paris in 1909, was still holding court in the early sixties on the Rue Jacob, at number twenty, where a little temple of “friendship” still stands in the garden, and where Mata Hari is said to have danced. Flanner hoped my friend would behave well—cautioning him that Barney was “the pope of lesbians,” a remark made originally by Jean Cocteau. My friend reports that she was somewhat vague, but impressive, lying on a banquette of white bamboo in her garden near the temple of friendship.

  Barney was beautiful and rich, and gathered around her a powerful, arty circle, people like Joyce, Flanner, of course, and Colette, and longtime friend the painter Romaine Brooks. The following list from a website devoted to her, of people who ate the cucumber (some say chicken) sandwiches and drank the champagne at her Friday salons, is worth quoting for its informative roster of Parisian figures:

  Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Colette, James Joyce, Paul Valéry, the Sitwell siblings, Pierre Loüys, Anatole France, Count Robert de Montesquiou, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, W. Somerset Maugham, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Isadora Duncan, Ezra Pound, Virgil Thomson, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Gide, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, George Antheil, Janet Flanner, Nancy Cunard, Peggy Guggenheim, Mina Loy, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Marie Laurencin, Oscar Milosz, Paul Claudel, Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Emma Calvé, Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Alan Seeger, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Françoise Sagan, and Marguerite Yourcenar.

  Hemingway is missing here—did he never meet this remarkable woman, true descendant of Marguerite de Navarre? He was a great friend of Sylvia Beach, another of the famous lesbians of St.-Germain, with her renowned bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and her role in publishing James Joyce. Beach’s partner Adrienne Monniers has in some ways always interested me more, maybe because she was such a good writer. The very first Shakespeare and Company was not on the Rue de l’Odéon but on the Rue Dupuytren, at number two—some American friends happen to live in that building now and have an old photo of the two women standing in their doorway under the sign. The more famous incarnation of Shakespeare and Company was at 12 Rue de l’Odéon, the street that runs from the Boulevard St.-Germain to the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the theater built in 1782 and still in operation, along with its small salle, Petit Odéon, for short plays by Becket or Brecht, sometimes in English.

  That wonderful writer and bookshop owner Adrienne Monnier stayed in Paris during the second war, like her friend Sylvia Beach. Monnier tells the story of when, after the war, Hemingway comes to see them, he offers to save her from reprisals if she has collaborated at all—and she, examining her conscience, finds that she has not collaborated at all. No one is sure about Gertr
ude Stein, however, who did leave Paris for a village outside, but, though Jewish, survived the war nicely.

  Barney, Beach, Flanner, Stein—these women left America for an unconventional and unconstricted life in Paris. So did countless other Americans, just as they had been doing since the eighteenth century, though in the twenties, they also came for alcohol. I’ve already recommended Brian N. Morton’s amusing book Americans in Paris, which gives the impression that nothing has changed since the founding of America; there has been at any given moment a large circle or set of Americans who may or may not know each other back in the States but who socialize here, as true for the very French-oriented Edith Wharton as for people today. It was Adams and Franklin, or it was Edna St. Vincent Millay and Natalie Clifford Barney. Not that all the Americans in Paris like each other; Edith Wharton, for instance, disapproved of fellow expatriate Elsie de Wolfe, the American decorator, she who famously remarked of the Parthenon, “It’s my color, beige!” But was it de Wolfe’s lesbianism or her racy language that incurred Wharton’s disapproval?

  Paris affects the American visitors, but it does not seem that they affect Paris very much. It keeps on being French, which is the point of coming here. As for going back to the U.S., it almost seems that it was unwise to do so. Many people had trouble fitting back in—Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to name two. The wisest, once finding themselves here, stayed here—like Stein and Toklas, Barney, Flanner, and countless others, who slip into an American overlay of the French scene, transparent presences in an almost independent parallel world, discussing American politics and movies, American books, throwing up their hands at the intricacies of French politics, disputing or not the (recent) French disapproval of American politics, which they also don’t really understand: “Explain your Electoral College again, s’il vous plaît.” “Why would you impeach someone for that?”

  Beside Sylvia Beach, some others were here during the Second World War, when Paris was occupied by the Germans—for instance, poor Morton Fullerton, Edith Wharton’s lover, living on in his unheated garret; poor Matilda Gay, widowed, her château outside Paris occupied by Germans; she died, old and ill, to the sound of the Nazi boots tromping through her rooms. (She was an aunt of my friend Charlotte, herself another instance of someone with a French first name, who lives here with her French husband.) Matilda Gay was married to the American painter Walter Gay, who earned a good living with his charming portraits of people’s rooms and furniture.

  Though the Germans didn’t seem to take too much of an interest in St.-Germain-des-Prés, many were billeted in the Lutetia Hotel, on the border of the sixth arrondissement in the seventh, and there are too many of those sad and moving plaques showing spots where someone “mort pour la France” and people still put flowers. The Germans did have a look in at Gertrude Stein’s apartment on the Rue de Fleurus, and apparently scoffed at her Picassos.

  More than three hundred years before, Queen Margot had observed that “captivity and its consequent solitude afforded me the double advantage of exciting a passion for study, and an inclination for devotion, advantages I had never experienced during the vanities and splendour of my prosperity.” The Occupation seems to have had something of that effect on Picasso, Sartre, Beauvoir, and other artists and writers, who worked well during the war. Unmolested, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir began coming to the Flore when their usual hangout in Montmartre was closed. Unlike most private apartments during the shortage of fuel, the Flore was warm, famously heated by a big stove. Beauvoir recounted her stratagems for getting a seat near it—one being to get up early and be there by opening time. Sartre lived for a time above the Café Bonaparte, where a friend of mine from Texas has rented an apartment now.

  We were in Paris on the day Sartre died, in 1980, and were planning to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, who were delayed by French television, which wanted a comment from her. She said she was speechless, though, because they kept prompting “wasn’t he a giant? Isn’t it the loss of a giant?” and she kept thinking about how short he was; her fabled propensity for blurting out the truth left her with nothing to say.

  The renowned “golden age” of St.-Germain-des-Prés came after the Second World War. It was then that Marie-Claude went to the Nuages, Dany Simon went to the Tabou, and saw, or knew, all the legendary characters. They went to lectures by Roland Barthes or Georges Bataille, bought jewelry from a glamorous Swedish baronness called Torun, ate when they could afford it at the Petit St.-Benoît. Marguerite Duras lived on the Rue St.-Benoît at that period, and went to Communist meetings at the Bonaparte—both of these places still in existence. Sometimes, having coffee at the Bonaparte (at the corner of Bonaparte and Rue Guillaume-Apollinaire), I can almost hear, in the animated French conversations going on around me, Duras and her comrades arguing the urgent party issues that consumed them.

  The seriousness with which French intellectuals and artists took communism is perhaps hard for Americans to grasp, so entrenched were we in our official national fear of it. (Whatever one’s individual experience: I was someone, no doubt typical of many Midwesterners, who had never met either a communist, or until recently even a Russian, and to whom, therefore, communism was too remote and abstract to seem a credible danger.) Marguerite Duras has described the bitter quarrels over such things as sincerity that kept earnest young party faithful bickering late over coffee or brandy at the Bonaparte about who was in or who was out of their cadre.

  Another successful hangout in the fifties was the Bar Vert on the Rue Jacob, where you went between ten and midnight. My friend the painter says that it eventually became a tourist attraction—people stood outside to glimpse the beautiful people who appeared on schedule as they made their nightly rounds. They were ogled because an enterprising journalist published their itinerary, which caused them to abandon it and move on to other places.

  Another of these was the Royal St.-Germain, in the spot where Emporio Armani is now, at the corner of Rue de Rennes and Boulevard St.-Germain; in the intervening phase the famous Drugstore was there, a place to buy anything, open around the clock. There is still a jazz club near here on Rue St.-Benoît. My husband John and Robert Gottlieb, the famous editor, went there one night and reported that it was serious, staid—a serious jazz-listening experience, no dancing. But the Tabou is long gone—or not so long, for though the spirit died by the early fifties, the place dragged on as a tourist sight til the early nineties. Former denizens of the Tabou were scornful at a re-creation of it the other night for French television. It showed a capacious suite of underground cellars, caves, but “the real Tabou was miniscule,” they said.

  I haven’t figured out exactly where it can have been, unless it was at the site of what is now Ruby, or Vodka, two clubs near that address. Inside Ruby, everyone was African, and champagne maison started at 169 euros the bottle. From their astonishment that we, a mild American couple, might want to come in, we inferred there was a second agenda, but I don’t know what; it was not a simple bar.

  The Tabou was at 33 Rue Dauphine, down in the caves for the chic, and upstairs, Boris Vian, popular playwright and novelist says, in his Manual of St.-Germain-des-Prés, for “Swedes, American communists with guitars and GI spectacles, English queers etc.”—i.e. the squares. Communism, however, went on being chic, in fact the only possible political philosophy for the fashionable young. There was a dress code, according to Vian: for men, brush cuts, long and curly in front, shirts open to the navel, colorful socks, and for women long hair, no lipstick. The fashionable existentialists looked, to modern eyes, like the cast of Happy Days or figures from a James Dean movie.

  There are still plenty of bars, in the American or English sense, as well as cafés where you can get a coup de rouge or a brandy with your coffee in the morning, but you never see the public drunkenness so common in England in and outside their pubs. The cafés of this neighborhood—Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots being the most famous—are always filled, all the time, with people drinking tea,
coffee or cocoa, or a glass of wine, and having a bite to eat at mealtime. I usually go to the Tabac des Beaux-Arts on the quay, less crowded, and happily located at the foot of Rue Bonaparte, thus, the closest to home, and with a view out on the little place with the statue of the Republic overlooking the river.

  Apparently there weren’t a lot of drugs in old St. Germain; what there was was opium, for the elderly addicts of Colette’s generation still around. The main narcotic was the sense of freedom that followed the war. Then, as today, you went to the Flore or Les Deux Magots as a fierce partisan of one but not the other. Boris Vian, tells the story of two couples, constrained by circumstances from going to their habitual Flore, who ran into each other at Les Deux Magots and became wildly excited—“What are you doing here!”—as if they had met by chance in some foreign land.

  REAL LIFE

  Bouquinistes line this side of the Seine, between the Pont du Carousel and the Pont de la Tournelle. After a stop on the Pont des Arts to browse through the stalls on the quai de Conti under the watchful eye of Condorcet, go down to the quayside, away from the noise and bustle of the street to contemplate the timeless views of the square du Vert-Galant, the Pont-Neuf and the towers of Notre Dame.

  from the MICHELIN GUIDE TO PARIS

  J. and I have settled into the cheerful life of the neighborhood. One of the things about St.-Germain is still that, because of its village quality, you run into people, or see people, you recognize. Catherine Deneuve is the most likely sighting of the truly famous around here these days. I’ve seen her twice in restaurants, a beautiful woman, slightly thickening in the middle, which is of course endearing, since she must be sixty. Lauren Bacall is often seen in the Flore, and once I saw her in the Monoprix, buying a present; I heard this strangely familiar voice, speaking French but with a strong American accent, looked over, and it was she.