An artist becomes part of an eternal tapestry.
THE TOLLING OF THE BELLS OF SACRÉ-COEUR SERVED AS A DAILY reminder of the sacred aspects of Montmartre. Their heady, metal pandemonium blotted out all other sound, emptying everything from my head for the minutes of the tolling. The bells were both a mantra and a white-out. I was living at the foot of Sacré-Coeur, the sugar-coated triple-domed spectre of white, which rules one of the seven hills of Paris, where the spirits of generations of mystics and artists have all played a role in the creation of this place.
The quartier is diverse, ethnic, Arabic, decaying. It does not possess the modern aura of Montparnasse. On some streets just below Sacré-Coeur, it takes a good hard look to realize you are not walking the marketplaces of Tunisia or Egypt. Shop vendors stand outside, heckling you as you pass, Monsieur, Mademoiselle, beautiful, please come in, want to buy a suitcase, a watch? You name it. None of the trendy shops of Boulevard St-Germain or St-Michel here.
To go home, I got off at Métro stop Château Rouge. One long block up, past the mostly Tunisian open market which was there on Wednesdays and Saturdays, a block left, and two blocks up. My studio apartment was located on a long narrow passageway, Passage Cottin, at the foot of an interminable flight of decrepit cement steps frequented by stray cats. The building had a decidedly industrial appearance, very basic. And my one-room studio on the third floor had only one window, which looked out to a blind court, a square of walls and rooftops, windows which glowed strangely orange in the lavender-indigo twilight. I could, on occasion, see the moon and a few stars by craning my neck and looking straight up into the black square. There was a large vent fan on the wall perpendicular to mine, which turned ceaselessly around and around, throwing shadows across the court at a certain time of day. I had no kitchen, just a hotplate. And a bathroom with a very deep but short bathtub, in which I spent many hours soaking in an embryonic trance induced by sandalwood bath oil, in the aftermath of a freezing afternoon visiting art galleries with my portfolio. The primordial landscape of my tiny apartment at the foot of Sacré-Coeur was not drawn with visual elements, however. It was the tolling of the bell, La Savoyarde, the largest in France, I’m told, the bell of Sacré-Coeur. This bell was the landscape which flooded my body, my eyes, my soul. I began to live according to the tolling of this amazing bell, as a monk’s day is delineated with ethereal chiming reminders signifying a transition, such as the call to vespers. Inside, I felt this way about the sound of this bell. It had become a call to prayer.
One night walking in Montmartre, I felt a longing—I wanted to see the ghosts of Picasso and Apollinaire come strolling arm-in-arm around the corner from a no-longer existing Bateau Lavoir, or Toulouse-Lautrec and Aristide Bruant, smoking and chatting outside the Chat Noir.
The sky was a deep violet, and the windows were all yellow and orange lit salons, as if by gas lanterns, with people in them living out different Paris dreams.
I felt myself go inside those lives. I smelled the smoke of a wood fire. I walked past Erik Satie’s house. I thought about a “way” of living in Paris, a style which flows with the character of the city, and blends in continuously. G.I. Gurdjieff frequented the cafés of Montmartre. He could not have been blind to its charm, to the subtle sounds and sublime vision through the fog of a deserted Sacré-Coeur towering above the butte. Vestiges of the ancient pagan tradition were everywhere, if you looked through Paris eyes. I had met so many people here who directed me to new paths, and that’s what living in Montmartre seemed to be about. But just what was it about Montmartre? The history I began to look at revealed some new twists.
“You are born French, but become Parisian.” I never learnt who said this, but it is true. All foreign students soon become Parisians and navigate the turbulent waves of the great city to their advantage.
—Shusha Guppy, A Girl in Paris
The rue des Abbesses is named after L’Abbaye aux Dames, an infamous cloister of Benedictine nuns founded in the early Middle Ages who ruled the butte sacrée with a zest for pleasures of the flesh. Henri IV’s wild escapades in the convent while making Montmartre his headquarters are notorious. As far back as the 18th century, Montmartre had already gained a reputation for sex and abandonment, even before a parade of artists and bohemian funlovers had made it popular. Mothers sold their daughters to wealthy officials in the likes of such frolicsome taverns as A la Fontaine d’Amour and Au Veau Qui Tète. The 19th-century art scene provided the current guidebook reputation of Montmartre as an enclave for hedonistic artists: Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Utrillo, Corot, Bonnard, Modigliani, Dufy, Ernst, Picasso, to name a few. Cabarets, underground theatre, dance-halls, and drinking establishments like the Chat Noir and the Lapin Agile proliferated in the twisted and cobbled passageways of the quartier. Today the vapid portraits and serene cityscapes displayed by the current “artists” of the Place du Tertre are a far cry from the energy and creativity of earlier times.
Leisurely afternoons spent browsing out-of-the-way, minuscule bookstores provided me with an unexpected surprise: a little ragedged book in French, Les Racines Sacrées de Paris by Pierre Gordon, or The Sacred Roots of Paris. A chapter on Montmartre traced the history of the colline sainte du nord, or sacred hill of the north, back to pre-Christian times. Now here was some interesting material. Montmartre, according to Gordon’s little book, did not derive its name from mons martyrum or “martyr hill,” as the prosaically-minded would have us believe, but instead had received the designation Mont Mercure, after the God Mercury, back in times of the Roman conquest. In the year 742 A.D., under the Carolingians, Montmartre was still called Mont Mercure. Mercury, or Hermes, was primarily the god of initiations. It was Caesar who designated Mercury the representative god of the Gauls. You can see the winged symbol for the god on a very quotidien blue square package of Gauloises, the prototypical filterless French cigarettes. And in the pervasive French cartoon, “Astérix.”
The Christian version of the Montmartre legend primarily describes the decapitation of St. Denis at the summit of the sacred hill, hence the appellation of Mount of the Martyrs which most standard guidebooks subscribe to. Gordon, however, maintains that initiation cults of pagan times frequently depict a “rite of the severed head,” thus ascertaining that a symbology existed prior to Christian interpretations of site-specific events. The severing of the head represents a psychological and spiritual death and rebirth, particularly in the case of an initiation rite. There is evidence that Dionysian initiation cults took place here as well.
From 700 to 500 B.C., hordes of Celts from Bavaria, Bohemia, and central Europe descended on fertile France and swallowed (or were swallowed by) the existing Cro-Magnon mixture. The Romans, observing that these Celts kept fighting roosters (in Latin, “rooster” is gallus), called them Gauls.
The French adore their Gallic ancestors. In the delightful comic strip Asterix, the little Gallic hero always outwits the block-headed Romans. The Gauls must have looked like today’s French from the Midi—of medium height, brown haired, brown eyed—contrary to the idealized French belief that the Gauls were tall, blond, and blue eyed. This belief persists: recently, the nativist politician Le Pen found it necessary to deny publicly that he used a peroxide bleach to produce his blond hair.
—Henry S. Reuss and Margaret M. Reuss, The Unknown South of France
Initiation was my prevailing mood at the time. There was my own cultural initiation of being a stranger in a strange land, learning the language and customs of a new country. I felt like a baby, groping for ways to express myself accurately. The French pay particular attention to the details of their language, especially pronunciation. I was also experiencing a deep personal initiation, of getting in touch with my self, turning 30. I had finally found my own apartment in Montmartre, after months of unsuccessful living experiments and sleazy hotels, house-sitting and transitional living with various acquaintances of old friends. And now, everyone I had met and knew was leaving Paris. I would stay on alone. The Paris I was getting acquainted with had the perpetually revolving face of Janus. Looking up as I wandered, I would see green and gold ancient gallic links of ivy, one crescent moon linking to the next, the spaces of sky reflecting between the trees and the medieval stone sides of buildings. After an inspired, formless day spent drinking Grog au Rhum in the afternoon café, I would find myself wandering aimlessly through the dark, misty streets, completely and utterly lost and alone.
One foggy February day I had decided to take the Métro rather than a bus. After the automatic doors banged shut, I had an intuition that I had made a grave mistake. Claustrophobia pierced my outer calm, and my worst fears were confirmed as fumes filled the car and then the lights went out. The train pitched us forward as brakes squealed. Dead calm and darkness. There was a black-out between Château Rouge and Barbès-Rochechouart. Smoke filled the train, which moved along like a slug through the dark tunnels, stopping every five seconds. I felt the invasion of fear, my palms sweating. There I was, a messenger with letters which had to be mailed. But no one was allowed to get on or off the train. At each stop, a voice from nowhere announced, “No one may descend at this stop. Please stay on the train.”
The following day, Paris showed me a different face. I walked through the winding streets, watched the old men playing pétanque. The sky was bright blue, and the sun was out. A large plant being unloaded from the back of a car resonated green against the ancient stone walls and I felt full of a Paris I loved, a place of intense magic. I went to the Musée de Cluny. One room was huge and white, full of headless white statues on a stage. I could imagine living in that room. The whiteness and mystery of that scene pitted against the roughness of 11th- and 12th-century artifacts fascinated me, and I lingered over the rich detail of the medieval tapestries, jewelry and relics. Paris, a sphinx of a city, could change like that in a day. And Paris was changing me.
One day I noticed a small, peculiar sign on the door of the neighbor who lived directly across from me, a man I rarely caught a glimpse of. He was apparently African, and wore a traditional long and colorful robe. I stopped to read the sign. He was a shaman, a medicine man! His sign read “The Grand African Medium.” Fascinated, I began to look for him every time I came in or out. Eventually, I found a reason to knock on his door. He was there, and kindly invited me in. His apartment was very plain, no decoration, just a few colorful African cloths thrown over a chair or two. He chatted with me very sociably, unpretentiously. I gradually got to know him better as time went on. He told me of his village in Mali where his grandfather was medicine man. He even invited me to stay with them if I ever got down to Mali. I felt very lucky to have been his neighbor, although I never did make it to Africa.
I wandered the winding streets of Montmartre on foggy nights, visited Masses in Latin at Sacré-Coeur (which seemed like pieces of performance art to me), heard Gregorian chants sung live in a medieval chapel, bickered with the Tunisian vendors at the Wednesday market, and suffered daily pilgrimages to the top of the Sacred Hill. I climbed the belltower of Sacré-Coeur, a tightlywound spiral of endless stairs straight up a narrow stone cylinder, but well worth the bird’s-eye view. And I spent many hours inside my apartment making art: magical, mystical paintings overwrought with shamanistic symbolism. I made the acquaintance of a French man, an enigmatic person and artist himself, who became my constant companion as we strolled the maze of streets, drank, and played chess in the cafés of Montmartre. Living there, in that place, turned out to be a turning point in my travels and in my life. From there, I traveled on to Turkey, where I later spent long periods of time and gathered experiences that changed my life completely.
One last vivid memory of Montmartre remains in my mind. After I had moved out of my apartment, and was leaving with my belongings—my cat and a large suitcase mostly filled with books which I dragged to the bus stop—I passed a man I did not know or recognize who said something to me. I will never forget what he said: “You haven’t changed.” I was shocked, and stopped to find out what he meant, who he was, but he seemed to disappear. I was left with only the image of his face looking directly at me, the eyes burning, and his mouth moving with those words. To this day, I take that experience as a visionary one. What he said was full of truth, but I did not realize it at the time. The enigmas of that man and his unexpected words had sealed off my time in Paris with a fitting postlude. I had to recognize in that moment, as I was getting on the bus, with the tolling of La Savoyarde in the background, that this hill had infused me with its very old magical spell. Montmartre would change my life, only much later.
Irene-Marie Spencer writes, paints, and climbs volcanoes in her spare time. The rest of her time is taken up with her four spirited daughters, a husband, two dogs, a cat, five rabbits, two guinea pigs, and two budgies. She hails from Wisconsin, but now lives with her family in New Zealand. Her first novel, Tales of the Moon and Water, was based on her experiences living in a fishing village on the island of Ekinlik in the Marmara Sea.
We stood in awe watching the red sunset behind Sacré-Coeur at the summit of Montmartre and its pink and orange reflection in the pools before the Palais de Chaillot. Silently we congratulated ourselves on providing the memory of a lifetime for the mature, cultured young gentleman that Kevin had become on his “Grand Tour.” With the magnificence of Paris laid out at our feet, I turned to my son and asked gently, “Kevin, what are you thinking of right now?” Expecting a nugget of inspired brilliance, I was dismayed to hear him say, “I wonder how my Little League team is doing tonight.”
I was crushed! Despite our best efforts, our son’s mind was still back in the all-American pastime.
To most, thoughts of Paris bring back memories of lost passion, lingering kisses along the quays, whispered conversations in sidewalk cafés. But my heart fills with love when I recall this light-hearted memory of my son’s childhood.
To this day, eighteen years later, whenever someone expects us to hold forth with some brilliant reply, our stock answer, followed by knowing smiles all around, is “I wonder how my Little League team is doing tonight.”
—Sharon Huck, “Bon Anniversaire”