Studio Babelsberg, Potsdam, Germany. February 2006. 2 p.m. 2 degrees below zero C. On the back lot, set designers have meticulously re–created a city street in middle Europe, c. 1920. A beat after the director waves “Action,” wet flakes of snow begin to fall. This is, after all, the studio that made Metropolis, The Blue Angel, and M. As Conrad Veidt’s Nazi colonel purrs in Casablanca, “I expected no less.”
IT’S ONE OF THOSE MILESTONE MOMENTS IN CINEMA HISTORY. GENE Kelly, delirious with newfound love for Debbie Reynolds, stomps and splashes around Los Angeles in the pouring rain, even pausing under a drainpipe to let water gush over his head. Maurice Chevalier had done much the same with Ann Sothern in the “Rhythm of the Rain” number for a 1935 film called Folies Bergère de Paris, but Kelly’s version put that to shame.
Few of us have such happy memories of being caught in a downpour. An instinct as ancient as the cave dweller drives us to seek shelter, however insubstantial, leaving the world of water to the fish, snails, and frogs. A traditional yardstick of intelligence decrees of the stupid, “Didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.”
This was what I mused, anyway, as I retreated deeper into a doorway in Montparnasse, the better to take advantage of its minimal shelter. It was February 14—Pluviôse 26 in the Republican calendar, in a month well named for its rain. Finding that the plant of the day was guède contributed to an overall sense of dankness. When Britain was largely bogs and rocks, my Celtic ancestors daubed their bodies with the blue dye it produced. They called it “woad.”
From across the street a youngish man sprinted toward me, sheltering something bulky under a voluminous coat. A tenant of this building? If so, he could probably buzz both of us into the vestibule, where I could wait out the storm in comfort. But his imploring look signaled that he was just another pedestrian, so I shuffled aside to make room.
To shake the rain from his coat, he had to let go of what he’d been protecting. With a hollow bong, a battered acoustic guitar dropped a few centimeters to the stone step. Almost certainly he was a street musician, a busker.
“Singin’ in the rain?” I said.
He looked blank. “Comment?”
I scrabbled for the translation. “Er, chantons sous la pluie?”
Clearly baffled, he peered at the rainy sky, then at me, and screwed up his brow to mime bafflement. Had I struck the one young Parisien who wasn’t into movies?
“C’est pas important,” I said.
We stood in silence for a few moments, until a lull in the shower cued him to pick up the guitar again and, with a nod, sprint off downhill toward the Jardins du Luxembourg.
I was in no hurry. And rain was still sufficiently exotic for me, after years of Australian and Californian summers, to be enjoyable in itself. It wasn’t until I went to live in Los Angeles that “Singin’ in the Rain” made sense. To dance under a Californian downpour was simply to celebrate its novelty.
Once the guitarist left, I realized my guess about him being a busker was probably wrong. He was French, while almost all buskers, in common with people writing in cafés or shopping at Louis Vuitton, are foreign.
Blame this on the complex relationship between Parisians and the street. Where in other cities the distinction between At Home and In Public is clearly defined, in Paris the nature of public and private space is a matter of constant redefinition.
Most of us look on the streets as dead ground, to be passed through as quickly as possible on our way to our true destination. In Los Angeles, I had barely put foot to pavement. To the French, however, the street is a destination in itself. Parisians dress to go out, even if just to the supermarket. Entering a shop, a café, even a bus, they greet the proprietor or driver as if visiting a friend in his home. Conversations of startling intimacy take place in the hearing of other pedestrians or passengers, and there is no city in the world where a more intimate relationship can be initiated by eyes meeting eyes in that glance of mutual interest.
Buskers in Paris, 1870s.
Daumier, Honoré. Les Musiciens de Paris. In La Caricature, November 11, 1874.
Few Frenchmen would insinuate a guitar or accordion into this intricate cultural exchange. Instead, metro passengers are serenaded by octets of Peruvians warbling on panpipes and pickup bands of American students doing upbeat versions of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.”
Neil Hornick and the Sidewalkers in Copenhagen.
Hart, Bruce. Neil Hornick and Sidewalkers in Copenhagen.
If Parisians sing in the street, it’s generally a form of advertising. Édith Piaf became a pavement vocalist to attract spectators for her father, a street acrobat and contortionist. In the 1920s, song pluggers cruised working–class suburbs. Selecting a courtyard with good acoustics, they sang a few choruses of the latest ballad to coax people to their windows, then sold them a copy of the sheet music. Albert Préjean played such a person in René Clair’s film Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris). Many Paris buskers today follow the tradition, selling CDs of their work.
The voices of street performers seldom lasted long. Singing in all weathers and at maximum volume strained the untrained voice, battering it into a grating growl well suited to the songs of poverty and despair written and performed by Aristide Bruant and Jehan Rictus, both of whom wrote of the streets but found their audience in the cabarets of Montmartre. Édith Piaf too was fortunate. A passing club owner recognized her talent, rescued her, disciplined her voice, coaxed her into her trademark little black dress, and made her famous.
These days, busking in Paris is strictly controlled. The city issues only three hundred permits each year, and these only after applicants have passed an audition in front of three fellow performers, the least sympathetic of judges.
It’s no game for the faint of heart. Britain’s Henry VIII swore to “whip unlicensed minstrels and players, fortune–tellers, pardoners and fencers, as well as beggars.” In Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris, the street performer Esmerelda is about to be hanged as a witch when she’s rescued by the bell ringer Quasimodo. More recently, when Édith Piaf’s mentor refused to sell her contract to some old friends from her street–singing days, they murdered him, possibly with her connivance.
Once on the street, modern buskers face a variety of risks, including being hassled and robbed by rivals and mocked and abused by drunken football fans, not to mention having the gendarmerie arrest them for performing outside their assigned location.
Despite this, the tradition has survived and flourished, even creating its own mythology. London buskers traditionally work the movie queues on Leicester Square or those for theaters on nearby Saint Martin’s Lane. A 1938 film, Sidewalks of London (also known as Saint Martin’s Lane), suggested that some might be stars waiting to be discovered—easy to believe when one of them is a young Vivien Leigh.
But most buskers are less interested in a theatrical career than in exploiting a modest talent for cash. My friend Neil busked across Europe in the 1960s, including a few turns on the trottoirs of Paris. I asked him what he recalled of the experience. Inevitably, his memories involved the weather.
“Paris in sunshine has a luster of its own. I lived close to the Luxembourg Gardens and loved strolling there, as well as dawdling and browsing at the book and postcard stalls along the Seine. Clearly there was no point in busking when the weather was bad—always disappointing, that—though punters queuing under an awning on la rive gauche in the drizzle in order to see the latest nouvelle vague movie appreciated a bit of live entertainment, even if on the raucous side.
“Otherwise, my only other weather–tinged memory concerns the beautiful German girl who took a fancy to me singing by the Seine and soon became my live–in girlfriend (in her chambre de bonne). One sunny, if windy, day we joined a group of friends on a picnic excursion. At one point during this déjeuner sur l’herbe, we covered ourselves from waist to toe with a light blanket, beneath which Ulrike contrived, to my surprise, to bring me to climax with her bare feet while our friends continued unknowingly to eat, drink, and chatter.”
Forget chestnuts and al fresco cafes. Such sensuous idylls as this celebrate what is truly distinctive about Paris in the spring.