Patrick Bade
Paris and Modernity, Part I: The Streets of Paris

Patrick Bade | Paris and Modernity, Part 1: The Streets of Paris

- [Patrick] Well, it’s lovely to be back with you. I’ve missed our exchanges at the end of talks. And a big thank you to Wendy for having facilitated everything. So what I want to do today is to take you on a walk through the streets of Paris, three streets, in particular, the Boulevard de la Chapelle, Boulevard de Rochechouart and the Boulevard de Clichy. And these are right behind my flat in Paris. Well, as you can see at the moment, I’m in London, but I very often walk along these streets that run along the foot of Montmartre. And so they’re rather scruffy streets. They’re probably not on many tourists’ bucket lists. I think the only touristic thing on these streets is the Moulin Rouge on the Boulevard de Clichy at the western end of the streets. But the more I have investigated the streets, the more fascinated I become by them because they have played such an important role in the early history of modern culture. And before I start, I’ll mention three things particularly associated with these streets. Cabaret as an art form was born on the Boulevard de Clichy. This is Rodolphe Salis on the left. And he founded the Chat Noir, which is always credited with being the first cabaret. Cabaret’s such an important art form for the early 20th century, politically and socially charged songs sung in a cafe while people eat and drink. And the Chat Noir in fact, had various addresses along these streets. But it was founded in 1881. And the first really famous cabaret performer was Aristide Bruant.

And he was a middle class man from the provinces who came to Paris, and he affected working class clothes. Look, look at the hat. That’s a working class hat, not a bush hat, but you can see all the men in the audience are wearing top hats. So he pretended to be working class and he sang in a sort of working class slang. And you can see all these very smart people, the ladies and gentlemen in their elegant hats who are arriving and sitting in this very scruffy little cafe, and he’s just standing on a bench. And he’s insulting them, and they love it. It’s a real frisson to be called filthy bourgeois by this fake working class man. So these days, in as far as he’s remembered, it’s usually for the famous posters that he commissioned from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. You see one on the left. But we can hear his voice. He made recordings. So I’m going to play you a little excerpt from a song about la Villette, la Villette, which is on the eastern end of these three streets that I’m talking about. So here is the earthy voice of Aristide Bruant, recorded just after 1900.

• This is number 11, Boulevard de Clichy, where Picasso lived from 1909 to 1912. He’d painted perhaps his most epoch-making picture, the Demoiselles d'Avignon in his previous studio in 1907, Le Bateau-Lavoir, further up the hill of Montmartre. But he lived at this address from 1909 until 1912. And I think one could say that these were, Picasso was always interesting, all the way through his long career, always doing new and exciting things. But I would say the three most important years of his entire career were these years, 1909 to 12. This is when he created Cubism. You can see a Cubist view up the hill to Sacre-Coeur on the right-hand side. This is the back of the studio block where he lived, where by this time he was making a bit of money. And these were purpose-built studios and had running water and there they’re a lot more comfortable than the Bateau-Lavoir. Here he is on the left in that studio, and on the right is his great friend Braque. The two of them, he described them as being like mountaineers tied together, climbing a mountain face. The two of them created Cubism, and both types of Cubism, the two important types of Cubism, the Analytical Cubism you see on the left hand side where the forms are shattered and broken down, and then the Synthetic Cubism, which comes with the introduction of collage, and it’s flat and colour comes back. Even if it’s not actually a collage, and I don’t think this one is on the right-hand side, it’s very collage-like.

Well, those two versions of Cubism were, I think, probably the most important early modern art movements that influenced absolutely everything that’s happened ever since. You could say Tracey Emin, who’s just, you probably heard in the news, she’s just been made a dame. Her work really goes back to Synthetic Cubism, what she does, putting things together. And the third thing I mentioned was Hebrew as a modern language. This gentleman on the left is Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. His birth name was Yitzhak Perlman. And one day he was in a cafe on the Boulevard de Clichy… I’m sure many of you have read Norman Lebrecht’s absolutely fascinating book about Jewish genius and anxiety. I know Judy interviewed him before lockdown. And in that book, he suggests that a very important meeting took place in the late 1870s at the Chat Noir. Well, actually that’s not possible because the Chat Noir didn’t open until 1881. So it must have been another cafe along the street where Ben-Yehuda bumped into a fellow Jew from Jerusalem. And they didn’t have a common modern language, but they managed to communicate with one another in ancient Hebrew. Most people considered it a dead language at this point. And a penny dropped. It was a eureka moment. He suddenly thought, “Yes, of course we need to revive Hebrew as a modern language.” So he created the first dictionary, he systematised the grammar, and of course he had to invent a lot of new words. A lot of things had happened, a lot of things had been invented in the past 2000 years. There were no Hebrew words for things like locomotives or telegraph or whatever.

So I’m thinking of starting this walk. I see Wendy’s come, and I’m really excited at the prospect of her coming to Paris. And I hope we’ll do some lovely walks. Perhaps she’ll come and we’ll start. This is my flat in Paris. You know the room on the right hand side, ‘cause I normally talk from that room. And it’s a two-room flat, so the other room you can see is equally cluttered with all the treasures I’ve been picking up at the flea market over the last few years in Paris. So I’ll have a nice breakfast. This is the view from… That I can see normally when I’m talking to you, sitting on my sofa in Paris, and with a lovely Belle Epoque cast iron garde-corps in the foreground. Sadly no longer there, 'cause it’s a dreadful piece of iconoclasm, really, the syndic of the building have replaced it with hideous modern bars for health and safety reasons. So we go down the stairs. This is a very typical spiral staircase you’ll find in the humbler Parisian apartment blocks. Until a couple of months ago, I had a wonderful neighbour who is an invalid elderly lady, and she was visited every day by charity nuns with the most extraordinary, huge headdresses. And I can tell you it’s quite something, at nine o'clock in the morning to bump into a nun in one of those headdresses on your staircase. So we go out into the street, this is opposite my flat, and you can see we’re in a very, it’s a gritty, industrial kind of urban area of Paris. So I’m right next to the Gare du Nord, and I’m just above the Gare de l'Est.

These are the tracks that lead into the Gare de l'Est. So it’s an area of railway tracks and these big 19th century cast iron bridges. I always call them Caillebotte bridges because of the famous paintings that Caillebotte made of similar bridges behind the Gare Saint-Lazare. So we turn right, and immediately, there’s this very handsome palazzo-like building, which is a former fire station, recently converted into a rather trendy design centre. And we continue walking past it and we see the architecture. This is a 19th century, second half of the 19th century area of Paris. So the architecture is the architecture of Baron Haussmann. Now often people ask me all the time, was he an architect? No, he wasn’t an architect. He just supervised the rebuilding, the modernization of Paris. And he set the very strict rules for the construction of buildings in Paris that lasted for well over 30 years, up until the 1890s. So all the buildings in Paris, say, between 1860 and 1890 are in this style. And you see, typically here, the way you get slices of buildings, chunks of buildings, sawn-off buildings in the Haussmann style. And this, on the left, this is a design made at the end of the 1930s for the opening scene of the film, “Le jour se leve” with Jean Gabin. In the film, lives in the top flat.

And over years, for decades, I had a fantasy, I wanted to live in Jean Gabin’s flat at the top of this building. And I read that the building does… It’s based on a building that actually exists that should be in my quartier. And I’ve been round looking for it. And I found similar buildings like the one you see on the right, but never actually this particular building. So that was straight ahead. We walk past the Maison Bichon, a wonderful boulangerie. When you come to live in Paris, you quickly realise that not all baguettes are equal. One baguette is not like another. So you search in the neighbourhood for the boulangerie that does the baguette the way you want it with the right texture. I like it bien cuit. I like it very crisp. So that’s where I buy my morning baguette. And in this area of Paris, it’s really the last outpost of traditional French civilization, because we’ll walk as we walk into that street, which is the Rue Louis Blanc. You can see, again, it’s a elegant 19th century Haussmannesque street from the first floor upwards, but it’s a completely Sri Lankan and Indian area of Paris, for, I dunno how many streets, half a dozen streets. Paris is more ghettoised, I’d say, than London. There’s areas of this where you can walk down several streets and not be able to buy anything that looks remotely recognisable in the way of vegetables or fruit. It’s all very, very Indian subcontinent. And then we arrive at the end of that street and we’re, this is about four minutes walk, I suppose, from my flat. We finally arrive at the Boulevard de la Chapelle. And so these three streets, which run continuously at the foot of Montmartre, they follow the notorious tax farmers’ wall that surrounded Paris from the late 18th century to the mid 19th century. So all the food and produce brought into Paris had to be taxed. It was one of the things, of course, one of the core principle causes of the French Revolution, the public dissatisfaction with this tax.

And there was a saying at the time, which means the wall surrounding Paris makes Paris complain. Now, if we turned right and we walk eastwards, we would get to this amazing, amazing building, which is the Barriere de la Villette. Now, when do you think that was built? I often ask people that. They never get the right answer. It’s an 18th century building. It was built in the 1780s by an architect called Ledoux, fantastically modern-looking building. And this was one of the places where there’s a gap in the wall and where you paid your taxes. And there were 50 of these in the wall around Paris. Only two survive intact, this one, Barrier de la Villette, and top right is the Barrier d'Enfer on the south end of central Paris. And that might be familiar to opera lovers, will know about that, because act three of “La boheme” takes place at the Barrier d'Enfer. And this is an opera production you can see on the left. Now along these streets, there is the Metro Line 2, and this was constructed in the early years of the 20th century. And it’s one of only two sections of the Metro in Paris which is raised above ground. It has to be because it has to go over the railway tracks going into the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l'Est, and it also has to go over the Canal Saint-Martin.

And it has these very distinctive fluted cast iron columns supporting it. And this is, on the right is a photograph of the great Romanian sculptor, Brancusi. Brancusi and Modigliani, they were great friends, and they used to sneak up to the construction site of Line Number 2 during the night to steal the blocks of wood, the sleepers, to turn them into sculptures. So in fact, we’re going to turn left when we get to that, to the Boulevard de la Chapelle, and walk westward, and we will go past the lines leading into the Gare du Nord. This is where Eurostar arrives in Paris. And that’s another view of it. And you can see the twin towers of the Church of Saint Vincent de Paul in the background. And the first thing we see on the left is a vast hospital complex, the Lariboisiere. This is an old photograph, but the original buildings survived. They’re being modernised at the moment, but this was the very first hospital in the world to be constructed along hygienic lines. I think Pasteur, of course, had made people aware of the importance of hygiene and the danger of germs. So this was the first hospital where it was built with separate wards and sections for different types of illnesses so that everybody wouldn’t infect everybody else. As we walk westward, the first Metro station, we can see it’s raised above ground. This is Barbes - Rochechouart. On the right hand side is the cinema Le Louxor. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. I love this station. And to me it’s also full of history. It was reconstructed exactly for the movie, “Les Portes de la nuit,” which came out just after the Second World War, which is most famous for Yves Montand singing “Autumn Leaves.”

I recommend that. You can see that on YouTube. And the other thing that I always think of when I walk past this station is a man called Colonel Fabien. You see the insert top left, this is him. And he was the very first… His real name was Pierre Georges. Colonel Fabien was a code name. And on the 21st of August, 1941, he was the first person to attack and kill a German soldier in occupied France on a platform of the station of Barbes - Rochechouart. It’s very extraordinary to think there was a whole year between the fall of France in June, 1940, more than a year, till August, 1941, when the French seemed to have completely accepted the German occupation. And in effect, they’d almost really changed sides. And the thing that changed that, of course, was Hitler attacking Stalin. And then Stalin activated the French Communists. And in fact, the particular event, which prompted Colonel Fabien to shoot a German soldier was that the Nazis had arrested and executed a Jewish Communist called Samuel Tyszelman. And this was a revenge act for that death. Colonel Fabian himself did not survive the war. He died right at the end of the war. He’s buried in Pere Lachaise. And this is a monument to heroes of the resistance who died in the Second World War. So this is what Boulevard de la Chapelle looked like around about 1900.

You can see Sacre-Coeur in the distance. And police records of the period show that all the buildings you can see in this photograph were devoted to the sex industry. Along the whole north section of the street, every building was either a licenced brothel or it was a hotel where you rented rooms by the hour for illicit sex. Now, as we look along these streets, particularly when we get towards the Moulin Rouge, you can see sex is still rearing its ugly head all the way along the street. There’s an awful lot of sex in evidence. The street walkers have pretty well disappeared, I think. In all the years I’ve been there, I’ve only ever encountered one in this section of Paris who propositioned me as I was walking down the street. I was completely astonished. More of the same. But also what I find actually quite touching is amongst all these sex shops are a whole lot of shops devoted to marriage. If you really want a glitzy wedding gown, this is the part of Paris to come to. And there are lots of these shops. Now, the entertainment… So the street, all three streets, you can say, from the moment they were constructed in the 1860s onwards, were devoted to various forms of pleasure and entertainment, whether it was prostitution, whether it was cabaret, or various kinds of theatre and musical theatre. And there are still many, many theatres surviving along this street. The one closest to me, so again, it’s only four minutes walk from my flat, is the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord. This was built as an… As you can see, it’s behind a Haussmann facade. You wouldn’t really know that it was a theatre. Looks like a residential block of the Haussmann period. But it’s a magical space. I love this theatre. It’s quite big and it’s kept its original decor, but deliberately it’s kept in a very decrepit, distressed state.

This was for many years very famous as the theatre of Peter Brook, who staged avant-garde performances here. These days I go there quite often, wonderful concerts and all kinds of theatrical events that take place in this theatre. And just a bit further along here, again, is Le Louxor, in an Egyptian art deco style. When I first saw this, I thought, “Oh yes, of course, 1920s, this must be inspired by Tutankhamun. But no, amazingly this was built the year before the discovery of Tutankhamun. It’s always said that Egyptian art deco is a style that came out of that momentous discovery. And it’s gorgeous inside, as you can see. And in fact, the director of that theatre is part of the little group of friends that I meet with two or three times a week in my favourite restaurant, La Fresque. So I see him quite often. Further along the street, on the other side, we come to Elysee Montmartre which has a lovely turn of the century, more or less our Art Nouveau facade. This is what it looks like today. But you can see the shop in the corner actually dates from the 1920s, whereas the building dates from 1900. This is what it looks like inside. And it can take about a thousand people. Still very, very active as a theatre. And then immediately afterwards, we come to Le Trianon. And the facade is, again, a little deceptive. It’s actually quite a bit bigger inside than you would guess from the outside. And it was where many, many famous Parisian performers have appeared here, Mistinguett, Frehel. Marie Dubas was popular woman performer in France in the 1930s.

And more recently, Carla Bruni, the wife of M. Sarkozy. This is what it looks like inside. Very handsome theatre. And further along is La Cigale. You can see it’s between two Haussmann blocks, again, sawn off. And the facade is super sleek, elegant art deco. But that, again, is a deception, because actually behind, it’s a 19th century theatre, somewhat similar to the Bouffes du Nord. And here again, four of the famous people who performed there, Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, Yvonne Printemps and Arletty. Immediately opposite was one of the most famous circus buildings in the world. It was originally the Cirque Fernando, later called Cirque Medrano, built in the 1870s, scandalously demolished in the 1970s. Even at the time there was a huge fuss about that. And replaced by this very hideous 1970s supermarket and apartment block. But we’re now on the Boulevard de Clichy. We’d be moving westwards. And it was surrounded by artist studios. And all the artists went to the Cirque Medrano. In fact, they were allowed to go for free. They could attend rehearsals and even some performances for free because the theatre, the circus management realised that if the artists painted pictures and they were shown in exhibitions, it was good publicity for them. Here are two paintings inspired by performances in the Cirque Fernando, so Renoir of two acrobats on the right hand side.

And this painting by Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. Currently those of you in Britain, those of you in London, I recommend a very nice little exhibition about this picture that’s currently just opened at the National Gallery. It’s very fascinating actually to read about this, that Degas, his studio was just around the corner from Cirque Fernando, and he was very impressed by Miss La La. And she actually, he made sketches on the spot in the circus. But she went round to his studio in the Rue Fontaine, and she posed for him in his studio. This is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, also at the Cirque Fernando. Two more places of entertainment, cabarets, in fact, that sadly don’t survive, also demolished. These were demolished in the 1930s, Heaven and Hell. I think Hell looks rather more fun than Heaven. And this is what Hell looks like inside, or looked like in the early 1900s. And then we finally on the Boulevard de Clichy, we get to the famous Moulin Rouge, opened in 1889, the year of the great exhibition in the Eiffel Tower. Of course, it’s been in the news. I’m sure you know, this is what it looks like. I took this photograph about two weeks ago in Paris of the Moulin Rouge, minus its famous sails. ‘cause they fell off in the night, luckily not hitting anybody. So I’m sure they will be restored soon. And the person who really made Moulin Rouge famous, of course, was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, this poster for the Moulin Rouge, showing La Goulue and Valentin le Desosse, the boneless one, two famous dancers from the Moulin Rouge. So here we’re at the beginning of the Boulevard de Clichy, and we’re looking up at the domes of the Sacre-Coeur, which was constructed between the beginning of the 1870s.

Not actually finished till at the end of the First World War. But it’s become, of course, such a symbol of Paris, painted countless times. And one of the things I like about it, and also the Eiffel Tower, both these two things that dominate the Paris skyline, that they play peekaboo with you. That you are walking on the street and you look sideways and whoops, oh, there it is on the horizon. As you walk along the street, you’ll get many, many glimpses of it at different angles in the distance. Now, once we’ve got to the Boulevard de Clichy, one of the things that strikes me about it is the difference between the side streets on either side. On the south side of Boulevard de Clichy, you have these very dense urban streets. They’re actually pre-Haussmann. They’re built in the first half of the 19th century. And they lead down towards the Opera and the centre of Paris, the Rue Fontaine. As you can see, Rue Fontaine as it looks today. Degas, for many years, he had his studio at 19 Rue Fontaine. That’s where he painted Miss La La. And at number 49, there was a hotel where the great cabaret performer Frehel died in 1951 in extreme poverty. And I want to dwell on her for a minute. She’s one of the most fascinating characters who inhabited these streets. She first made a reputation before the first World War when she was a gorgeous young woman.

She was a babe, when you see pictures of her. Really, really pretty woman. And but she was one of those people who was eventually, of course, terminally self-destructive. She had quite a long running relationship with Maurice Chevalier, and he dumped her for Mistinguett. And she attempted to stab the lovers, fled from France, disappeared for several years, was rumoured to be a lover of the queen of Romania. Landed up for a while in brothels in Turkey, came back to Paris in the interwar period totally changed. People were shocked by her physical change. Years of drink, drugs, dissipation had completely ruined her. But they also, in a way created her. And she was much loved for these songs, always kind of wrist-slashing songs of dissipation and drug abuse and prostitution, whatever. And so I’m going to play you a little bit of her voice, one of her most famous songs in later years was, "Ou sont mes amants,” where have all my lovers gone, she’s singing.

• She says, my heart hasn’t grown older, but where are my lovers? Well, we can all say that, I suppose. And then a little bit, the next street along is Rue Blanche. And if we walk down that street for a few minutes, we will come to this very palatial house that you see on the right-hand side, which was the first town palace of the notorious La Paiva. La Paiva had been born in great poverty in a ghetto in Russia. She was not considered to be beautiful. And she doesn’t really look very beautiful in this photograph, does she? But she used sex very ruthlessly to rise to the top. And she was probably the best paid courtesan of the 19th century. And landed up, eventually, even this palace, you see on the right-hand side, was too small for her. And she had an even more magnificent palace built for herself on the Champs-Elysees, which is now a gentleman’s club. And you can visit it, and it’s absolutely jaw dropping inside. So the streets on the south side that descend towards central Paris are quite elegant urban streets. But the little streets on the north side, remember this, the north side was outside official Paris. It was outside the tax wall. And these have a really rural, village-like quality to them, streets leading up steeply to Montmartre. This is the Cite Veron where the poet, Jacque Prevert, he lived on this little street. Even if you don’t know his name, many of you will have seen the famous French films for which he wrote the scripts like “Les Enfants du Paradis” and “Le jour se leve.” So you can see, this is a lovely area to walk around on foot. And it’s so amazing, you are just yards away from the hustle bustle and the sex shops and whatever, and the scruffiness of the Boulevard de Clichy. And you seem to be in a little country village or town.

Now the architecture, one of the things I enjoy about Paris is that so many buildings of the 19th and 20th century are signed and dated. You see two examples here of buildings from 1900 and 1889 along these streets. And the streets were conceived and started in the 1860s. So as I said, the style then right up to the '90s was Haussmannesque where there were absolutely strict regulations about the height of the buildings, what level the balconies could be on. It was absolutely forbidden to have any projection from the facade. So all tightly, tightly regulated. But, so there was relatively little scope for architects to express any kind of individuality. But one area of the buildings where they do is the wonderful cast iron balconies and garde-corps that is such a feature of Paris buildings, as you can see. In Paris apartment blocks, the windows run right down to floor level. So you need the guard core to stop children and pets falling out the window. More examples here. And as I said, one of the things that always struck me when I first went to Paris as a child as very strange, were these kind of sawn-off buildings. You can see here we’re on just at the start of the Boulevard de Clichy. And you can see some Haussmann blocks that had just abruptly stopped, and the earlier buildings have survived. Clearly it fascinated Vincent van Gogh as well. He lived on the Rue Lepic, just off the Boulevard de Clichy. And this is the view from… It’s his brother’s apartment, painted in 1886. And we can see a sawn-off Haussmann block on the right-hand side.

And again, just to show you these very, very beautiful, and each one slightly different, the garde-corps, then the designers had a little bit more freedom to play around, metal work. This is a Wallace fountain, Richard Wallace, of the Wallace Collection. He was the illegitimate son of the Marquess of Hertford. When the Marquess of Hertford died in 1870, just at the time the Franco-Prussian War, he left his fortune and his art collection to his illegitimate son, Richard Wallace. And the first thing he did was to donate 50 of these drinking fountains to Paris. Of course, up till this time in Paris, one of the great health hazards was drinking water, epidemics of typhoid and cholera and so on. And so it was a very important gift that he made to the city of Paris. They’re still working. There’s one if you want to. I’ve never actually had the nerve to drink the water from one of these fountains, but I imagine it’s probably safe. Now here we know that we’re past 1890 because the Haussmann rules have now been broken. They were relaxed in the 1890s. So this gave architects a lot more freedom, and you could have projections on buildings as you have with these. So these will date from a very end of the 19th century. And then we get to Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau is a represented along these streets by the famous Metro entrances of Hector Guimard. In fact, in France, the Art Nouveau style is sometimes called the style metro. And we have three of these stations in a row, Anvers, Blanche, Pigalle, and art deco, where there’s is plenty of art deco too. This is the Hotel Carlton, recently restored. This is the interior of the dining room.

And other art deco details as we walk along these streets. Now, studios, artists’ studios, you’ll find especially Boulevard de Clichy that most of the buildings on the south side of the street that face north have these big studio windows. The one on the left I’ve shown you already, it’s Picasso’s studio. This is the studio of Anders Zorn, the very successful Finnish artist. And that’s a self-portrait that he made in the studio. I don’t think it would bother him actually too much that he has to share his apartment and his studio with a sex shop ‘cause he certainly painted a lot of very sexy pictures. This is a picture, which is actually, the title of this picture is Rue Pigalle, which is the address of his studio. This was painted in that studio. And I don’t think anybody would say that any of these streets are… And we’re not talking Venice or Florence or even the more picturesque parts of Paris. As I said, the streets are scruffy, but they still inspired artists. This is Boldini. And the detail that I find kind of delightful and amusing really is the way, the loving way he’s depicted the horse shit. When you think of tens of thousands of horses in Paris running through Paris every day, hundreds of thousands, actually. It was said 20,000 horses went past the Opera every day. That’s an awful lot of horse shit. I think Paris in the 19th century, that would’ve been one of the overwhelming smells of the city. Here is a rather triste view of the Boulevard de Clichy by van Gogh. This is Pissarro, the same. This is a lesser-known artist called Goeneutte, but you might know it 'cause it’s in the Tate Gallery in London. This is Signac. So all these artists painting these streets.

And the very young Picasso. You wouldn’t recognise this, of course, as a Picasso. He’s only 20 years old when he paints this in a more or less impressionist style. Now, walking along the streets again from east to west, there are enormous number of plaques on the buildings for famous people who lived on the streets. So this is Boulevard de Rochechouart, and it’s the house where Jean Gabin was born. He’s the star of the film I mentioned, “Le jour se leve.” He was probably the biggest male film star in France from the 1930s right up to the 1950s. And then we move along a little bit on the other side of the street is the house where Gustave Charpentier spent nearly all his very, very long life. And he is known for his opera “Louise.” In fact, the opera is really a celebration of Paris. If you love Paris, as I do, I’m sure you’ll love the opera “Louise,” which so vividly evokes the atmosphere of Paris. And once we get to the Boulevard de Clichy, this is where the buildings are absolutely bristling with plaques for famous artists of one kind or another. Number 6 Boulevard de Clichy is where Degas lived in the final years of his life. One of the stories I like about this, he moved into this apartment, of course, he was nearly blind at this time, and somebody said to him, “Why didn’t you get a telephone?” And he said, “Oh, what’s that?” And he said, “Oh, it’s brilliant. If you have a telephone, you can talk to somebody on the other side of Paris.” And he said, “Oh, that’s absolutely amazing. How does it work?” And they said, “Well, it’s very simple. A bell rings.” And he said, “Yes, and then what?” And they said, “Well, then you go and you pick up the phone.” He said, “Oh, no, no, no. I would be a servant if I had to obey a bell.”

I so sympathise with that. I hate the tyranny of the telephone. Of course, Degas was an old curmudgeon. And what you see on the right-hand side is actually a still of a silent movie taken off him secretly in 1915 by Sacha Guitry. This was the height of the First World War. And Sacha Guitry wanted to make a propaganda film celebrating the superiority of French culture. So he went, he interviewed Sarah Bernhardt, he interviewed Monet, Rodin, Gaston, Renoir, and it’s wonderful. But we don’t have their voices 'cause they’re silent films. But wonderful to see these people in moving film. Of course, Degas was the only one who refused to cooperate, so Sacha Guitry actually stalked him. He waited on the street for Degas to come, and he filmed him tottering along the street. Then next door, the number 8 Boulevard de Clichy, there are two famous people who lived in this building, both of them, again, I really feel like kissing the pavement when I walk past. You’ve got Degas next door to Darius Milhaud, the composer, and it says here, he lived in this house from 1923 to '74. That’s not strictly true, because there were four years he didn’t live there. He had to flee to America during the German occupation. This is his autobiography. I really… There is an English translation, but I recommend it either in English or French. It’s a joyous book.

And you can see the title is “Ma vie heureuse,” and he was a very happy person. He was somebody who was completely happy in his skin. And the first sentence of the book is, . He said, this is how he defines himself, “I’m a Frenchman. I’m from Provence, and my religion is Jewish.” And so as I said, he had to flee in 1940. But in an act of great optimism and faith, I think you have to say, the conductor, Roger Desormiere, paid the rent on his flat for the four years of the occupation, no feeling in his bones that the Germans would eventually be defeated and Milhaud would be able to come back again. Here is a postwar picture of Milhaud behind his garde-corps on the first floor. Now, although he came back to his flat after the war and lived the rest of his life there, the Germans had actually pillaged it and taken everything of value out of the flat. But somebody in a very macabre, I suppose you could say a humorous gesture, the one thing they left in the flat was the score of Wagner’s “Parsifal” on the mantelpiece that you see here in this image. And it was a kind of knowing joke, I think, because “Parsifal” of course, is the longest opera in the standard repertoire. It four hours and 50 minutes of music, and Milhaud was known for his brevity. And his opera, “L'Enlevement d'Europe,” has the record of being the shortest opera in the repertoire. It’s only eight minutes long. In the same building, in the chambre de bonne at the top of the building, so of course, Milhaud was in the comfortable first floor apartment, and at the top of the building was Boris Vian.

And he’s another hero for me. A polymath, an extraordinary man. He was a novelist, a critic, a very gifted jazz musician, composer and singer. He gained notoriety with his novel “J'irai cracher sur vos tombes,” I will spit on your tomb. He pretended that it was written by a mixed race American and that he had just translated it in French, but actually he’d written it himself. Although I think he’d never even been to America when he wrote it. So I suppose today he might be criticised by some for cultural appropriation, whatever that is. I find it one of the dafter aspects of PC thinking. But he’s outside of France. He is principally known for one song, “The Deserter.” And this is a possibly, I suppose, the most celebrated protest song of the 20th century. And it was written in the early 1950s. It was banned in France for years, and it was written in protest against the Indo-Chinese War, of course, in the French version. And then when the Americans went into Vietnam after the French, it became very famous in an American version. You can see it’s a pacifist song. He’s writing to the President to say that he is going to reject his military papers and he’s going to desert. And he says, “I was not put in this world to kill innocent people.” So I’m going to play you his own version. This is Boris Vian singing his famous song, “The Deserter.”

• I find it very, very moving actually, and of course very relevant with all that’s going on in the world today. Well, just a couple of buildings along we get to, actually, this is number 18 Boulevard de Clichy. Number 16 was where Whistler lived in the 1860s. And it’s where he painted his perhaps his most radical and important painting, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. That building has been replaced. That’s why I’m showing you this one. I’m not sure Whistler would be very happy to share his studio with Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then we get to another place, which is… I’ve recently made a pilgrimage here because along with my good friend Ron, who I’m having lunch with tomorrow, we’ve both become very fascinated by an artist called Hermine David. We both bought works by her. And I’ll talk more about her in my next talk next Sunday. But she was the wife of the Bulgarian Jewish painter Jules Pascin. And they were in a menage a trois. He divided his attentions between his wife and his mistress, his favourite model, Lucy Krohg. And the insert, you see there is his painting of his wife and his mistress together. And he was somebody, I think today he would be described as bipolar. He had terrible mood swings. And at the height of his success and fame in 1930, he committed suicide in this building. He slashed his wrists and in his own blood on the wall, he wrote, “Adieu Lucy,” goodbye to his mistress. And that didn’t finish him off.

So he actually hanged himself, a very determined suicide. And then in his will, it turned out that he’d left all his, yeah, all his goods, all his… Worth a lot, his money, his paintings were highly sought after, equally divided between his wife and his mistress. And surprisingly, perhaps they really got on well together and had a very devoted friendship for the rest of their lives. So we finished up, might as well, all of us finish up in the cemetery, I suppose, sooner or later. But this walk finishes up at the cemetery of Montmartre. Paris is full of very interesting cemeteries, with the Pere Lachaise, probably the most famous, and so many famous people are buried in Pere Lachaise. And same with Montparnasse. But Montmartre is a little bit smaller, but it’s very beautiful. It’s actually Trudy Gold’s favourite Paris cemetery. Whenever she comes to Paris, she always wants me to take her to this cemetery. And I think one of the things that makes it so special and so picturesque is that it’s built… It’s created inside an old gypsum quarry. So it’s really deep in the earth, underneath the hill of Montmartre. Here is the entrance to the cemetery. And you can see one of these 19th century cast iron bridges going right across the middle of it, actually. And the buildings on the street level towering over the cemetery. I took these photographs about a month ago. It was a public holiday. And it’s a lovely place to go for a walk on a sunny day. And if there is very high Jewish component in this cemetery, many, many Jewish tombs. Unlike Pere Lachaise, they’re not segregated.

They’re not separated. So you can see here a Star of David and the cross. And all around the cemetery, as you see, these two symbols side by side. Here is the whole cemetery, and when you arrive, there are posters that show you who is where. And God, what a cast! Hector Berlioz, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Monsieur Careme, who invented caramel, Charcot, the notorious neurologist, painter Chasseriau, Clouzot, filmmaker, Dalida, The Lady of the Camellias, Degas. Oh, it is just… Nijinski, Offenbach. It’s really incredible who is in this cemetery. Pretty well everybody who is anybody. And, wait a minute, dwell on this. Here, so here are the two tombs of course, that Trudy has to visit when she goes there. It’s Emile Zola. Actually he’s not in it because sometime after he was interred in this tomb, he was then transferred. His physical remains were transferred to the Pantheon. So this is an empty tomb, but Heine is certainly in that tomb on the right-hand side. Berlioz, here is a place, my favourite place of pilgrimage in the cemetery is the area where you find Offenbach close to Degas. And this is a man called Osiris, Daniel Iffla Osiris. I love this tomb too. You can see it’s a bronze copy of the Michelangelo Moses. He was a very successful Jewish financier, an enormous philanthropist. In a way, he was a kind of Wendy Fisher of his day. He was a man who did an enormous amount of good for France. He saved the palace of Malmaison and gave it to France.

Many, many other good deeds that he did. This is Victor Brauner. This is, as you can see, a Jewish tomb from the Stars of David, that I took this photograph, again, a couple of weeks ago. And the door is open, but it doesn’t seem to have been despoiled or desecrated. And this is my final image of a married couple where obviously the father was Jewish and the mother was Christian. So we see the Star of David and the crucifix on the same tomb. Now that’s it. So I can see we’ve got some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you, Max. I’m so happy to be back. That’s really wonderful. Thank you for all these.

Q: What was the Metro stop in the background of the slide?

A: Metro, well, that’s… I’m not sure. I’d have go look.

Thank you, Rhonda. Right, and Caravaggio, there’s a very interesting little show at the National Gallery at the moment of a recently discovered Caravaggio.

Q: How is it for Jews in Paris?

A: I don’t really know, actually, to tell you the truth. And I understand so much that it’s pretty scary for Jews everywhere in London. I’m not sure it’s as scary in Paris as it is in London, actually. I haven’t come across huge demonstrations and protests.

Q: What was the theatre where Sarah Bernhardt played?

A: She played in many theatres in Paris. She played… There’s the Theatre des Varietes on the Boulevard des Italiens. But the theatre most associated with her, and it was actually named after for a while, is the Theatre de la Ville at Chatelet by the river Seine.

Why is there an Indian neighbourhood, I know! Well, actually, of course the French did have… They had an enclave in India, Pondicherry, which they kept and right up until the post-war period. But I’m not quite sure why there are so many Indians. There are quite… Not as many as are in London, but of course in London there are also plenty of Algerians.

That hideous 1970s building, yeah, I suppose it’s of its time, and I shouldn’t say that. But I only find it hideous because it replaced a much-loved piece of Parisian history. On Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste, I don’t think I would know enough about it, to tell you the truth.

Margaret’s been following on a map of Paris. Yes, well, it is quite simple. It’s just along three consecutive streets where I’ve taken you. Yeah, yeah, but the whole history, of course, of the Second World War is so fascinating in France, and so full of ironies. The thinking behind the sawn-off buildings was that they would continue, and often they didn’t. For whatever reason, they ran out of money. And they assumed…

What the idea, of the thinking behind it, was that the whole of Paris would be uniform and following the rules of Haussmann. But in the end, of course it didn’t prove to be possible. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Madeleine. Did I say Finnish? Sorry, I’ve been rapped over the knuckles about that. Yes, I don’t know. I had a very close Swedish friend, and I said it to her once that he was Finnish, and she corrected me.

Thank you, Rita. And thank you all.

Do I ever… I’ve done an art tour of the south of France for MRT just before Covid. But I think it’s not… I’m a big city person. I’m not really a Cote d'Azur person. I don’t think I’d be likely to do another one.

La Goulue is definitely buried in the Montmartre. Of “La Perichole,” I have to think about that. Maybe there’s a melodic similarity.

Oh, oh, Miriam, dear Miriam, thank you so much for your message. You’re such a good and wonderful friend. I appreciate it.

The name of the cemetery at the end is Montmartre. Montmartre, the cemetery of Montmartre. So thank you all very, very much indeed. As I said, I’m thrilled to be back. I’m looking forward to talking to you again next Sunday.