Monsieur Nicolas On The Ile Saint-Louis

One of my favourite characters on my “Notre Dame and the Ile Saint-Louis” walking tour is the self-described “perverted peasant” Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, the most prolific writer of the 18th century.  The secluded quays of the Ile Saint-Louis in those years were popular places for lovers’ trysts.  But they were not as alone they thought, thanks to Monsieur Nicolas.  Every night this obsessive nightwalker (an owl was his emblem) would cross from his lodgings in the Latin Quarter, spy on the doings of couples, scratch coded notes on the walls, and continue his rounds.  The next day he would come back and copy his notes for use in his chronicles Le Paysan perverti and Les Nuits de Paris. But the scratches are gone, erased over the centuries by prudes and the elements.

Monsieur Nicolas was the first writer to see ordinary Parisians as worthy subjects for literature, launching a genre.  Les Nuits de Paris, his vibrant, accurately observed multi-volume chronicle of his prowls in pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary Paris, was wildly successful. But forced into retirement by ill health, he ended in poverty. All the same, two thousand admirers, from streetwalkers to duchesses, followed the “perverted peasant” to the cemetery after his death on February 3, 1806.

Writers in the Luxembourg Gardens - The French

More than at any other time in French literary history, the 19th century saw the high point of popular adoration of writers.  As evidence of that, all we need do is stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens and see all the statues and busts of poets and novelists from that era.  

Le Marchand de Masques

My personal favorite is the 1883 sculpture called Le Marchand de Masques – The Mask Merchant – by Zacharie Astruc. It shows a boy hawking masks of famous writers, artists, and composers.  He is waving one of the masks on high; others are seen at his feet.  One of these of is Honoré de Balzac, who lived near the park in the 1830s, during the period of Le Père Goriot and other great novels.  At night he would circle the garden in his monk’s cowl, candelabra in his hand.  The mask in the young merchant’s hand is that of the most idolized writer of the century, Victor Hugo.  He lived nearby as a boy, loved roaming the park, and later, in Les Misérables, he had Marius catching his first glimpse of Cosette on a pathway by the tree nursery. Soon they would be exchanging amorous sighs.

Only steps from the Boulevard Saint-Michel gate of the Luxembourg Gardens, on the same woodsy plateau as The Mask Merchant, we find a marble statue of George Sand. She and her lover Alfred de Musset, the boy wonder of Romantic poetry, strolled the secluded pathways together.  He later wrote about their storm-tossed affair in his bitter novel Confessions of a Child of the Century.  She wrote about it more calmly in her autobiography.

George Sand

On the same path as George Sand’s statue is a stele honoring Stendhal, the author of two of the century’s greatest novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Just steps beyond him is a bust of Sand’s dear friend Gustave Flaubert, whose scandalous masterpiece  Madame Bovary got him tried for obscenity in 1857. The same year, same charge, and in the same Paris courtroom, Charles Baudelaire was put on trial for his shocking poems in Les Fleurs du Mal. Flaubert and Baudelaire wrote back and forth condemning the Second Empire for the hypocritical and ultimately damaging ordeal it had put them through.  A bust of Baudelaire is to be found – if you look carefully -- over by the orchard.  

On a path to the east of the Palais de Luxembourg, the seat of the French Senate, we find novelist Henri Mürger, the author of Scènes de la vie de bohème, looking no way bohemian at all. Up the hill on the same path is the bust of “art for art sake” poet Théodore de Banville. He is bare-chested. Verlaine called him “the one with the tits.”

Paul Verlaine

As for Paul Verlaine, his elaborate bust is all the way to the west of the garden. As famed in his time for his debauchery as for his exquisite poetry, Verlaine was elected as Prince of Poets in 1894 by the leading poets of France. Verlaine was deeply moved by the honor. From the window of his shabby hotel the newly crowned prince gestured toward the Luxembourg Gardens and said, “I have no palace, but this is my royal park.”

Writers in the Luxembourg Gardens - The Americans

Surrounded as it is by such intensely literary areas as the Latin Quarter, Saint Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse, it’s no surprise that “the Luco” has long been a magnet to writers, foreign as well as French. But as we are English-speakers, most of us, anyway, we start with a batch of American writers who succumbed to its charm and wrote about it -- Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner – and will look at the French writers the next time.

In James’s 1903 novel The Ambassadors the trusty Lambert Strether has been sent from his home town of Wollett, Massachusetts, by the formidable Mrs. Newsome, his fiancé and boss, to find out what’s going on with her son Chad. The young man has spent five years in Paris and shows no sign of coming home. With Chad out of town when Strether arrives, he takes a few days to put himself “in relation” to the city,revisiting scenes from his own stay when he was a young man:

“In the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and here, on a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas,fountains, little trees in garden tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at play all sunnily ‘composed’ together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his emotions seemed truly to overflow.”

Two decades after The Ambassadors came out another American coming here was the “very poor and very happy” young Hemingway in the years he would write about in A Moveable Feast.  As he says in the memoir, he would walk in the park when he was “belly-empty, hollow hungry” to escape the tantalizing odours of food on the streets. “You saw and smelled nothingto eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.” Besides protecting himself from smells, he would go in the Luxembourg Museum, where Cézanne’s paintings were on display. Being hungry made him understood Cézanne’s work more truly,

he believed.

Young Hem would also cut through the park to visit Gertrude Stein at her atelier on the rue de Fleurus, just down the street from the western gate.  Stein loved the Luxembourg Gardens. She and Alice took their daily walks in the tree-lined alleyways. Coincidentally, Stein landed in Paris the same year The Ambassadors came out.  She was deeply influenced by James’s writing.  In the 1920s she would tick off for her visitors the four greats of American literature:  “Poe, Whitman, James, and myself.”  And since James had passed away a few years earlier, she was the only one left standing.

In 1925 William Faulkner lived in a garret room overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens on the rue de Vaugirard. It was the only place he liked in Paris.  He planned to stay for two years, but left after only five months and went back to his true creative milieu in Mississippi

and future home to his mythical Yoknapatawpha County. The only literary use of Faulkner’s stay in Paris is set in the final pages of his 1931 novel Sanctuary, where we find the young heroine Temple Drake, unhinged by her kidnapping at the hands of the pervert Popeye, having been brought to Europe by her father to help her forget. The scene takes place at a concert in the Luxembourg Gardens:

“Rich and resonant the brasses crashed and died in the thick green twilight, rolling over them in rich sad waves. Temple yawned behind her hand, then she took out a compact and opened it on a face in miniature sullen and discontented and sad. Beside her her father sat, his hands crossed on the head of his stick, the rigid bar of his moustache beaded with moisture like frosted silver.  She closed the compact and from beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves of music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the opposite semicircle of trees where at somber intervals the dead tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the season of rain and

death.”

Walking the "Lost Generation" Art Deco

Me with Martha’s daughter-in-law Rebecca

There's more than just writers on my "Lost Generation" Montparnasse literary walking tour, and one of my recent walkers shows us why.  She is Martha Bardach, a retired photo editor, whose eye for the significant architectural detail is as sharp as ever.  This we shall see in Le Select, La Coupole, the former Dingo, and the Closerie des Lilas, haunts of Hemingway, and many other writers in the Art Deco days of the 1920s. And, oh yes, there's a glimpse of me in action!

No less than four scenes are set in the cafe Le Select in Ernest Hemingway's first novel The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, just a year after the cafe opened.

The massive cafe and restaurant La Coupole opened on December 27th, 1927, and has been popular with writers and everyone else ever since. Josephine Baker used to parade among the tables with her pet cheetah Chiquita in a diamond leash and collar.

A Pillar Fresco

Local Montparnasse artists volunteered to paint frescos on the pillars in exchange for meals.

In May 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald first met Ernest Hemingway at this literary relic, the old wooden bar at the then-Dingo American Bar, now the Auberge de Venise.  Hem writes about their encounter (not very kindly) in A Moveable Feast.

Right: The Closerie des Lilas, Hemingway's writing headquarters when he lived down the street from 1924 to 1926.

Edith Wharton on the Rue de Varenne

Edith Wharton

In 1906 Edith Wharton and her husband Teddy sublet George Vanderbilt’s spacious apartment at No. 58 Rue de Varenne, now an annex of the Prime Minister’s office. She was forty-four years old, a famous novelist thanks to her second novel, The House of Mirth, a critical and financial success the previous year, but she was suffocating intellectually in the high society circles of New York and Newport. Wharton was fluent in French thanks to a childhood spent in Europe, and she wanted to challenge her mind in the vibrant cultural climate of Paris, which she adored.  “Je l’ai dans mon sang,” she wrote in her diary. Henry James called her the “pendulum woman” because of her clockwork-like annual visits. Between 1885 and 1914, she made sixty to seventy Atlantic crossings. This time she meant to stay through the winter. The Whartons arrived with six servants, a cook, their automobile and chauffeur, and two dogs.

58 Rue de Varenne

She was a close friend of other Americans with equally strong ties to Europe, including Henry Adams, Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, Bernard Berenson, and her literary idol James.  And in  the spring of 1907 she met a dark, handsome, mustachioed American in Paris named Morton Fullerton, a Harvard graduate, correspondent for the Times of London, and friend of Henry James since 1890. Three years her junior at thirty-nine, he was cultivated, seductive, and “very intelligent, but slightly mysterious, I think,” she told a friend.  She saw in him the possibility of something she dreamed of, but had never experienced: a complete relationship with a man. They became regular theater and travel companions and, early in 1908, lovers. As her letters and poems to him make clear, she took enormous joy in their lovemaking and experienced at long last her erotic awakening. In the second year of the affair, however,

Fullerton alternated between brief periods of passion

Morton Fullerton

and long unexplained silences, very painful to her. Though she never learned his full range of his erotic involvements, they included numerous lovers of both sexes, a short-lived marriage to a French opera singer, and a current affair with his young cousin Katherine. He was also being blackmailed by a woman who had proof of his homosexual past. The affair ended in 1910, but Wharton continued to see him as a friend and advised him about his writing. Most importantly for her readers, her fiction took on a new emotional depth thanks her ability to describe love in the full range of emotions it arouses -- jealousy, sadness, guilt, rejection, possessiveness, bliss -- in such novels as Ethan Frome, The Reef (with Fullerton the model for George Darrow), and her masterpiece The Age of Innocence.

53 Rue de Varenne

In 1910, having decided to live in Paris, she moved with her husband Teddy to a larger apartment in the house across the street at No. 53, where a plaque quotes her saying:

“My years of Paris life were spent entirely in Rue de Varenne – rich years, crowded and happy years.”  

But these years were also blighted by her relationship with Teddy, a mentally unstable man twelve years her elder with whom she had never had an emotionally, intellectually, or sexually fulfilling marriage, who secretly squandered her money, and was a philanderer to boot. His wayward manipulations eventually forced her to sell the splendid house she built in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Mount.  In 1913, after twenty-eight increasingly painful years of marriage, she finally divorced Teddy.

With the outbreak of World War I, she threw herself into war work, creating a network of orphanages, hostels, clinics, and crafts workshops to aid displaced people in Flanders and northeastern France. Her friends André Gide and Jean Cocteau worked for “Mrs. Wharton’s Charities,” as they were known. In 1916 she was made a chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur.

After the war Wharton moved to the Pavillon Colombe, an elegant 18th century house she bought in Saint Brice-sous-Fôret north of Paris, wintering at her Château Sainte-Claire overlooking the Mediterranean in Hyères. Her final years were rife with rewards, including the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921 and an honorary doctorate from Yale two years later, the first woman to be so honored by the university. As the grande dame of American letters, she received countless literary admirers, most embarrassingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald when he visited her in 1925. He was in such awe of her, both socially and artistically, that he kept fortifying himself with little nips on the drive to her house and ended up making a complete ass of himself. She, gracious lady, took it in stride.

Edith Wharton died in 1937 and is buried at the American Cemetery in Versailles.

DEATHLESS WRITERS IN THE PERE LACHAISE CEMETERY

Second in popularity in my series of Writers in Paris Walking Tours, the first being the ones dominated by Ernest Hemingway and his 1920s “Lost Generation” associates, is the moody, magnificently verdant Pere Lachaise Cemetery. This walk  features the final resting places -- fascinating all -- of Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, Balzac, Moliere, Jim Morrison, Colette, the medieval lovers Heloise and Abelard and others.

Where could you find such an illustrious bunch of writers as these?

Irresistibly drawn to this cemetery was explorer extraordinaire Dale Dunlop (www.themaritimeexplorer.ca), who had previously written that marvellous piece about my “Lost Generation” Montparnasse walk (scroll below for that piece), and who now wrote another of his remarkable text-and-photo spreads entitled “Walking Pere Lachaise with David Burke.”

Here’s the link: http://themaritimeexplorer.ca/2015/04/30/walking-pere-lachaise-david-burke/

Check it out.  

You will enjoy Dale’s sprightly take on it. I guarantee!

Welcome back to Writers in Paris Walking Tours for 2015.

I am pleased to tell you that I received a great honor this year in Lonely Planet's book BEST IN TRAVEL 2015.  It features Top 10  bests in many travel categories, one of them being "Top 10 Literary Walking Tours of the World."  And in that lot of 10 you will find -- you guessed it already --moi, David Burke.  Thank you, Lonely Planet!

And adding to that pleasure, here is a wonderful piece about my "Lost Generation" Montparnasse walk by Canada's extraordinary world explorer Dale Dunlop, who joined me on it with his wife Alison and sister Anne last week. I urge you to take a look at his take on it in superb pictures and astute text.  Here is the web link:
themaritimeexplorer.ca/2015/04/22/search-hemingway-david-burke/

NOTE:  make that:  www.themaritimeexplorer.ca/2015/04/22/search-hemingway-david-burke/