FranÇois Truffaut: Cité Charles-Godon, near rue Milton
RAISING HELL IN PIGALLE: FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT’S THE 400 BLOWS
LOCATIONS: 33, rue de Navarin; rue des Martyrs; rue Milton; Place Pigalle, Streets of the Ninth Arrondissement
MÉTRO: Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Far more than any natural mother or father, the streets of Paris, especially those of the ninth arrondissement, nourished the identity of one of France’s favorite filmmakers, François Truffaut (1932–1984): They created the imagination of the artist he would become. Their rambunctious energy kept alive in the unwanted child the curiosity and desire that his nasty childhood somehow didn’t destroy.
Born to a single mother, who lived at 21, rue Henri-Monnier with her Catholic family, François was handed over at birth to the care of a wet nurse. Almost three years later, his grandmother, Geneviève de Monferrand, rescued him for the second time (three years earlier she had talked her eighteen-year-old daughter out of aborting him); when she discovered the baby sickly and half-starving, she brought him home to live with her and her family. A woman who loved music and literature—she wrote a novel, was a passionate reader who read to little François every day, and walked him to bookstores and the local public library—she protected him from his mother/her eldest daughter when she came (rarely) to visit and criticize François.
Truffaut’s grandmother died when he was eight. His stepfather, Roland Truffaut, insisted—against Truffaut’s mother’s wishes—that the boy move in with him and his unloving mother. This change of address, with its loss of affection and new portions of adult heartlessness, marked Truffaut’s memory forever.
For the Traveler
The best introduction to the Paris of Truffaut’s art is his five-film saga about troubled youth: The 400 Blows, Antoine and Colette, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, Love on the Run, all available on DVD as “The Adventures of Antoine Doinel.” His street world is the setting of many of these films but especially the first one, the autobiographical The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cent Coups), for which he won the Best Director award at Cannes in 1959 at the age of twenty-seven.
This film, like Truffaut’s young life, unfolds along the streets of lower Montmartre between rue Blanche and rue des Martyrs, a web spreading east and west of the main north/south streets that lead uphill to Pigalle and the butte (hill) of Montmartre: rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette; rue des Martyrs; rue Saint-Georges, rue Henri-Monnier. Climb them, zigzagging east, west, right, and left, as you walk the home ground of one of the great directors in French film history.1 His neighborhood’s vitality, seediness, and local color make a perfect backdrop for the film’s emotional texture, the patches of cruelty, a child’s misery, the adolescent’s joy of escape.
There are moments when the streets of the ninth seem to be the movie’s main character, or better, Truffaut’s muse. They are made of moving light, people, concrete. More than anything, Truffaut loves the open everyday world as opposed to the impersonal abstraction of intellectual analysis. As his mentor and friend, the film director Jean Renoir (son of the painter, Auguste Renoir, who also lived in the ninth), taught him, “Reality is always magic.”
Start at the bottom of the hill of rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette at the rear of the church of the same name (where rue Saint-Lazare ends); follow it uphill (north) as it forks left, across Place Saint-Georges, bearing right—or really straight uphill, into rue Henri-Monnier.
The busy sex trade along these streets took off in the nineteenth century, observing a definite hierarchy: the lorettes, named after the church, were middle-ground female prostitutes, serving the area’s dense theater trade; lower than the grand-dame courtesan-mistresses installed in the new hôtels particuliers (on and off nearby rue de La Rochefoucauld in the area called Nouvelle Athènes where Chopin and Georges Sand lived in Square d’Orléans (see here); and higher than the plain freelance streetwalkers of the Quartier de Breda. The lorettes’ trade overlapped with the Quartier de Breda, where impoverished street prostitutes walked the rue de Breda, renamed rue Henri-Monnier in 1905. Place Pigalle, a few blocks to the north, parallel to boulevard de Clichy, was the largest meeting ground of prostitutes in the ninth. It was understood that they lived outside conventional Parisian society, engaged in an illicit profession.2
For Truffaut, who crossed the Place often, the sex trade simply came with the territory. (He set the scene of his mother’s marital infidelity in The 400 Blows on Place de Clichy.) He would grow up to visit prostitutes in their Pigalle and Montmartre brothels on a regular basis, his “relationships with women … in tune with the frenzied life he lead”—his liaisons matching his insatiable appetite for films, as his biographers put it.3
When François was ten, he moved into 33, rue de Navarin (right, off rue Henri-Monnier, now marked with a plaque). The street matches the bleakness of the five years François (called “Antoine Doinel” in The 400 Blows) lived there with his parents, a time of heartbreaking neglect only relieved by his days at school where he made a few good friends and had fun running the streets on the days they played hooky: rue Milton (east off rue des Martyrs) and at the bottom of a long winding hill where his school was located and is still in operation; rue de Douai (southwest from Place Pigalle) where his friend Robert lived; the shops along hilly rue des Martyrs where the truants turned into petty thieves. The movie theaters on Place Pigalle and boulevard de Clichy (the dividing line between the ninth and the Montmartre butte were their favorite escapes. Back then, during the Nazi Occupation—though Truffaut’s movie is set in the fifties—there were twenty movie “palaces” between Place de Clichy and rue de La Rochechouart. (In postwar Paris there were four hundred movie theaters, half of them near the Truffaut apartment.) Weekends (and three Christmases in a row) François/Antoine was left alone by his parents who liked mountain climbing; they ridiculed the boy’s preference for roaming the lorettes to climbing the hills of Fontainebleau. On his own he saw some movies as many as twelve times; he and his friends wrote a film newsletter which they peddled along rue des Martyrs, Truffaut’s debut as a film critic.4
By the time he was twelve he was reading three books a week (mostly Balzac and Dickens, as a truant holed up in his friend’s apartment on rue de Douai) and, also as a truant, sneaking into three films a day. “Life was the screen,” he said later.
The little outlaw was punished severely at school and home. Some nights he slept in alleys rather than face the severe consequences of his truancy and cover-up lies. In the film we see Antoine/François running in the pale light of dawn to wash his face in the icy water of the pool in front of the church of Sainte-Trinité, on the east side of la Place d’Estienne d’Orves and rue Saint-Lazare. We also see him running along the bridge of rue Caulaincourt above the Montmartre cemetery, carrying the typewriter he’d stolen. Despite the trouble he winds up in, we can feel his elation not so much over what he thinks he’s getting away with as his sense of the wind at his back, the freedom of the open street. He knows the ninth like a conductor knows his orchestra or a different child might know his home.
The career of the street urchin/movie journalist ended when he was thrown out of school and home and locked up in a juvenile detention center. But the boy genius of fast escapes and street smarts broke free to run north, pursued by the forces of law and order he would always despise, ending up on the Normandy coast facing the undefined freedom of the vast open sea.
The 400 Blows’ win at Cannes brought invasion of his privacy; but with his new wealth he made loans to friends and family, helped them pay off debts and back taxes; his celebrity enabled him to keep on working, continuously, producing a steady often prize-winning run of popular films. (Small Change, Jules and Jim, Mississippi Mermaid, The Wild Child, Fahrenheit 451, Two English Girls, The Story of Adele H., Day for Night, and his last and biggest box office success, The Last Métro, some of which was shot in Le Théâtre Saint-Georges, on the left as you ascend rue Saint-Georges and enter the Place Saint-Georges. You may visit the lobby but not the actual theater.) Travelers who have the time to wander along the streets of lower and upper Montmartre, will enjoy being able to recognize many Truffaut settings in the five-film saga featuring Antoine Doinel.
Truffaut, in the fifties, became the founder of the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) movement that began to change the look of French movies. With his friends and fellow directors Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard, he adopted techniques that corresponded to the way he had seen the world—in particular the streets—since he was a child: their quick, spontaneous rhythms, informal and vaudevillian characters, the simplicity of the outdoor settings. As a New Wave director he used rapid filming, young actors, natural lighting rather than interior studio sets. At the same time he turned away from the “psychological realism” of past French movies, the directors’ so-called true-to-life characters, always base, infamous, vile, spineless, for whom the directors and screenwriters have contempt. Instead, wrote Truffaut in the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma, “the director should have the same humility toward his characters that St. Francis of Assisi had toward God.”
Above all, he wrote, movies should have a pulse—like his rue des Martyrs in early morning when the street markets open and local shoppers and vendors greet one another by name. (Elaine Sciolino’s The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs guides us along this old multiculti street of unpretentious Parisians, making a delightful companion on our exploration of Truffaut’s world.)
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Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984 at the age of fifty-two. If he’d lived a long life, he would still recognize the streets of his youth. There is gentrification in this part of the ninth but it has not destroyed its original heart and soul.
Some changes would no doubt please Truffaut. Across Square Berlioz at the end of rue de Douai (where the ninth gives way to the eighth), as you follow rue de Bruxelles downhill, you pass on the left the house—21 bis, rue de Bruxelles—where Émile Zola died in his bed of asphyxiation, a revenge killing, it is thought, for his attack on the army and support for the convicted—but innocent—Jewish soldier Alfred Dreyfus in his article “J’Accuse!”—the chimney flue was found stuffed. There is now a plaque on the building’s exterior and quotes from his article on the walls of its inside lobby, all of it a validation of Zola’s courage. Truffaut, as a director, a film critic, and a human being always identified with the underdog. Street prostitutes, working men down on their luck, lonely children—in Truffaut’s movies, we feel only his sympathy and respect.
Returning to—and crossing Square Berlioz again—turn left into rue Blanche, a street Truffaut knew well: It leads up the hill to the movie theaters of Clichy. As you climb the hill of rue Blanche, you’ll be approaching the Moulin Rouge, once a windmill, now a touristy cabaret in the eighteenth arrondissement, the quartier of Clichy. The multiplex on Place de Clichy is crowded day and night; Parisians love the cinema, and they still turn out for a Truffaut retrospective (as cinèphiles do for Truffaut festivals at New York City’s Film Forum).
One block west along boulevard de Clichy and off to the right is avenue Rachel, the only entrance to the cemetery of Montmartre, which lies beneath the rue Caulaincourt bridge. Truffaut is buried here in Division 1, under a simple black onyx stone in the company of artists. Berlioz, La Goulue, Degas, Rodin, Heine, Zola (before his remains were moved to the Panthéon), Stendhal, Nijinsky. In his movie Love on the Run, Truffaut buries his/Antoine Doinel’s mother here. The cemetery, originally a gypsum quarry, is quiet, shadowed with tall trees and a groundcover of the wildflowers Colette used to come here to pick. Visitors leave single red roses on Truffaut’s grave.
Standing here in the first light of morning, I like to remember words he said to an interviewer:
I see life as very hard. I believe one should have a very simple, very crude and very strong moral system. One should say “yes; yes,” and do exactly as one pleases.
This is quintessential Truffaut, to the end the canny little rebel of his native streets, the lifeline of his hardscrabble world in northern Paris.
Nearby
LE BON GEORGES 45, rue Saint-Georges on the corner. Tel: 01.48.78.40.30. www.LeBonGeorges.com. A lively good bistro, crowded at lunchtime.
PÈRE TANGUY 14, rue Clauzel, right off rue Henri-Monnier at Place Gustave Toudouze. The art shop of Père Tanguy, where Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh met, bought oil paints, displayed their work, and van Gogh saw Japanese prints brought from Japan by Père Tanguy. Van Gogh painted his portrait (now in the Rodin Museum). Père Tanguy was the only person from the Paris art world to attend van Gogh’s funeral. Many prints are on sale. Across the street, on the south corner of rues Clauzel and Henri-Monnier is a Japanese restaurant, Yumiko.
LA PRAIRIE Boulangerie at 50 bis, rue de Douai as you face Square Berlioz. (Métro: Blanche; Place de Clichy.) The proprietor serves excellent pastry and clear directions to Zola’s last home in Paris.
SACD, SOCIETY OF AUTHORS AND DRAMATIC COMPOSERS www.sacd.fr. 11, rue Ballu, a beautiful streetscape with stunning architecture. Turn left into rue de Clichy from Zola’s rue de Bruxelles, then left again and straight ahead into rue Ballu. Truffaut, who was active in defending his industry from censorship, unfair contracts, and government meddling, supported the SACD, founded in 1777 by the comic dramatist Beaumarchais (The Marriage of Figaro) to defend the legal rights of writers, dramatists, and in our time, filmmakers and other artists. You may enter this gracious building—and its annex just down the street—where the members of SACD meet in a lovely salon facing a garden in which a bust of Rabelais has pride of place.
LE DIT VIN No. 68 on the corner of rue Blanche. The owner of this charming little wine bar is an engaging storyteller who shares stories of the ninth’s past as a playground for wealthy tycoons, actresses, opera singers—the originals of Zola’s characters.
