Bohemia: Like Greenwich Village, Montmartre Is Both Place and State of Mind

Most of us have noticed the advertising with the image of a strikingly beautiful woman in scarlet, embracing her lover. Behind them looms the illuminated windmill of the Moulin Rouge, a nightclub in the Montmartre section of Paris, beyond which is an evening panorama of the city. The Moulin Rouge was a glorified center of prostitution, but the history of Montmartre in the last century is mere gentrification. Somehow, though, Hollywood classifies all this as romantic.

Something clicked in memory and I took down Montmartre by Philippe Jullian. It reproduces Georges Rochegrosse's poster for the sensational 1900 premiere of Gustave Charpentier's masterpiece, the opera Louise. The poster shows Louise, a seamstress, and Julien, her lover, a penniless poet, embracing at the crest of Montmartre, as evening falls and the city shines behind them in what Carl Van Vechten called "a glittering labyrinth of lights." This is the opera's great moment, when the heroine sings "Depuis le jour," an aria rejoicing in the beauty of life made visible by love. Charpentier was nearly a caricature of the Bohemian romantic, with his shaggy hair and beard, rakish hats, flowing red ties and long cloaks. Although he composed throughout his very long life (he died at 95 in 1956), only Louise remains in the repertoire. It is enough. He wrote both libretto and music between 1889 and 1896. Four years passed before its production because his use of criminal slang and Parisian street cries seemed radical. To our ears, Louise is a sentimental and picturesque farrago of Richard Wagner and Jules Massenet, uniting nearly every warmhearted romantic cliche about Montmartre: the working girl whose parents resent her penniless lover, all amidst a colorful background of homeless street people, artists, pimps and prostitutes.

Obviously, like Greenwich Village, Montmartre is both place and state of mind. At least one person has proclaimed Montmartre a republic: the Manhattan White Pages lists a Government of Montmartre at 310 E. 70 St. Reportedly a private joke, its subheads include the Residence of the Ambassador as well as the Gowanus Canal Zone Authority, National Theatre-Theatre du Grand-Guignol de Paris and Montmartre Military Mission to the Kurds, which, one gathers, has not yet proven successful.

This reminded me of the two Republics of Greenwich Village proclaimed before 1920, one of which was taken seriously by the police. According to Allan Churchill's The Improper Bohemians, Ellis O. Jones, a magazine editor and spare-time playwright, believed "the world at large should be more aware of...the unique multifarious freedoms of the land minus seacoast called Bohemia," or at least that part of it called Greenwich Village. He argued the Village should declare its independence. Jones planted stories in friends' newspaper columns and announced he would proclaim the Republic on a convenient day at 11 a.m. As he somehow believed thousands would attend, he shifted the ceremony from Washington Square to the Mall in Central Park. The police were unamused. They considered all demonstrations potential anarchist riots. Moreover, Jones was a known revolutionary: he was associated with the great leftist review, The Masses.

On the appointed day, despite ominous clouds, hundreds of police officers, including a machine-gun detachment, swarmed the Mall with orders to break heads and shoot if necessary to scatter the crowd.

Then it rained. Only Jones and a few friends had appeared. Nonetheless, the police charged and Jones was thrown into a patrol wagon. As the cops sped off, Churchill says, "...a feminine voice suddenly shrieked, 'Three cheers for Ellis O. Jones!'"

Some years later, Gertrude Drick, a willowy, bobbed-haired, Texas-born Villager, also declared Greenwich Village a state unto itself. A painter and violinist, she had been the muse of James Oppenheim, author of "Bread and Roses," whose verse had hailed her as the Golden Bird. Drick was often depressed: Churchill wrote that for those occasions, she kept a stock of black-bordered calling cards bearing the single word WOE. When asked to explain, Drick replied, "Because Woe is me."

Stanford White's Washington Square arch has a small door in its western column. In 1916, Drick tried the knob. It turned. She climbed a stairway to the top of the arch. She decided it would be a fine spot for declaring Greenwich Village's independence. After buying Chinese lanterns, red balloons, food and drink, she invited John Sloan, her painting teacher, artist Marcel Duchamp and several friends. Each guest was issued a cap pistol for waging the revolution. Drick read aloud her Declaration of Independence, which consisted of repetitions of the word "Whereas." The revolutionaries fired their cap pistols and then ate and drank. In the dawn's early light, police and passersby found the red balloons and Chinese lanterns flying proudly from the parapet. The door in the arch is locked now.

Greenwich Village is barely three centuries old. Montmartre has been developing attitude for 2000 years. It stands above the city on a butte, and as the winds are persistent, windmills, or moulins, for grinding grain stood on Montmartre as early as 1292. Nearby farmers hauled their grain to the windmills, and the bakers came from Paris to buy flour. It was a happy relationship. Montmartre became even happier when Parisians flocked to its taverns for the inexpensive wines exempt from city sales tax. Miners quarried the butte itself for gypsum to make imitation alabaster?Jullian suggests plaster of Paris was really plaster of Montmartre.

Despite its windmills and genial taverns, Montmartre was an industrial suburb, filled with riffraff seeking refuge from the Paris authorities. By the 1830s, artists, the shock troops of gentrification, were moving into the area, drawn by cheap rents. They would include Millet, Delacroix and Degas. There, Alfred de Musset created Mimi Pinson, who personifies the working-class Parisienne: the milliner or seamstress who lives in an attic with her window full of flowers. The most memorable character in Henri Murger's Scenes de La Vie de Boheme, the source of Puccini's La Boheme, shares her first name and taste in decor.

Pierre Renoir lived and worked in Montmartre for 40 years. He often went dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, an old windmill converted to a dance hall and tavern. In 1876, he set up his canvas in the hall and painted Moulin de la Galette (a list of the girls who posed for him survives). By contrast, the Moulin Rouge had never been a windmill but a cheap dance hall bearing a phony illuminated red windmill, "like the lamp of a vast brothel." The Moulin Rouge was a sex market, protected by the collusion of pimps and police. Here in 1891, the woman called La Goulue (the Glutton) enjoyed her immense, short-lived success as a dancer, commemorated in numerous posters by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. She drank herself out of a career within five years and died a homeless tramp in 1929.

Toulouse-Lautrec, the Moulin Rouge's house artist, had settled in Montmartre in 1884. Witty, often lighthearted and kind, he was a superb observer of gutter life. Despite his dwarfishness, he did not lack companionship: his personality overcame his looks, and there was a legend among the girls that nature had compensated for his deformed legs with an extraordinary physical endowment. The painter was often malicious: Jullian recounts that, when he saw a girl "known for her willingness to oblige with oral sex" enter the Moulin Rouge with a swollen face, he asked, "Pregnant?"

Meanwhile, Montmartre's gentrification had begun driving out the poor artists who had triggered its transformation. For example, Erik Satie began his career in the 1880s as a piano player in Montmartre bars, including Rodolphe Salis' cabaret, Le Chat Noir. Salis, who had started out as a painter, founded Le Chat Noir on realizing he was a better business manager. A stray cat on the premises inspired the bar's name. A resident literary clique, the Hydropathes, named for their dislike of the taste of water, produced its literary magazine, also named Le Chat Noir. According to Jullian, Salis enthusiastically lavished invective on his guests. He was also amazingly familiar: when Queen Victoria's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, visited the Chat Noir, Salis greeted him with, "And that mother of yours, still well as ever?"

While banging the bar's piano, Satie began serious composition. He wrote with grace and simplicity, in a clear-cut musical language stripped of picturesque ornament. Though obscure, Satie was not completely isolated: he knew Claude Debussy, and after the premiere of La Mer, Satie said of its first movement, which portrays the sea between dawn and midday: "Old chap, there was a little bit in particular between half past ten and a quarter to eleven that I thought was terrific."

When Montmartre became too expensive, Satie moved to Arcueil, a gritty factory suburb, and walked 10 miles across Paris daily to work because he could not afford cab fare. After all, Satie's music royalties for the first quarter of 1903 totaled 76 centimes: roughly 15 cents at the time. Once, when offered a loan, he replied, "Sir, what you have said did not fall on a deaf ear."

He concealed his shyness with a facade of elaborate mockery, keeping the world at bay with puns, facetious word play and absurdism. His works bore titles such as Le Poisson reveur (the dreaming fish), Embryons desseches (dried embryos), Trois Morceaux en forme de poire (three pieces in the form of a pear), Veritables preludes flasque (pour un chien) (genuine flabby preludes (for a dog)) and Choses vues a droite et a gauche (sans lunettes) (things seen to right and left (without glasses)). His instructions to performers are also unusual: in place of, say, "andante," Satie inserted "Without pride," "Fit yourself with clear-sightedness" or "Like a nightingale with toothache." All were carefully written with colored inks in his elegant calligraphy.

In contrast to Debussy or even Charpentier, Satie remained poor throughout his life, perhaps because, as he wrote toward the end, "A true musician must be obedient to his art, he must place it above all human wretchedness, he must draw his courage from within himself and himself alone." He agreed with his friend and lyricist, Leon-Paul Fargue, who wrote, "I call bourgeois anyone who renounces himself, the struggles of life, and love, for safety's sake. I call bourgeois anyone who puts anything above feeling." On his deathbed in 1925, Satie told a friend, "I have never written a note I didn't mean."