The Streets of Paris

Patrick Modiano: Place Émile-Goudeau, La Butte Montmartre

LOCATION: Rue Berthe and Place Émile-Goudeau, La Butte Montmartre

MÉTRO: Lamarck-Caulaincourt

The name Patrick Modiano drew a blank in the States when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. But in Paris, his home city, his many novels (more than thirty) are read, the screenplay he wrote for Louis Malle’s masterpiece Lacombe, Lucien remains a favorite, and the songs he wrote for Françoise Hardy you hear in cafés and on the radio. Still, Modiano, as man and artist, remains a mystery man. The search for phantoms of history is his basic plotline, the searches as well as the enigmatic love stories, all of which take place along the streets of Paris.

In the face of mystery, however, Modiano has one clear focus. In his early novels, he is obsessed with the crimes committed by Nazis and their French collaborators during the Occupation of Paris in the Second World War. He was one of the first writers to address the question of French collaboration. (Perhaps this is why some Parisians do not like Modiano’s writing.) Born in 1945, he thinks of himself as a child of the Occupation nightmare. He wants to find out what happened in the years just before he was born and just after, uncover the secret stories of the victims, the criminals, the disappeared.

Modiano is the narrator of his searches. The one phenomenon he knows with certainty as he walks and walks is the map of Paris. To follow him along the streets, through all the neighborhoods included in the contents of this book, is to feel both the urgency and the sadness of his pursuits. His theme is said to be memory, its many faces, the loss of it, how over time it changes and lies. The streets do not lie. Their names are specific; they lead him to specific destinations. Most of the destinations tell only partial stories. Some tell nothing. There is one dead end after another.

The grimness of the history he is investigating distracts him in many places. But in the end it is physical place that offers some connection, even moments of happiness. On the butte of Montmartre, he feels “the joy of the hill,” in the words of Eric Hazan. Maybe the word “joy” is a little much for the antiromantic Modiano. But from one angle, Montmartre, in the here and now, does deliver him from the tomb of the past.

* * *

To begin at the beginning, Modiano grew up as the elder son of a father of Italian-Jewish origins who kept his distance from his children, leaving them with crooks, gangsters, fellow black marketeers, actors, eccentrics, with whom he did his shady business deals; the mother was a failed Belgian actress who had no interest in her children, showing nothing but “insensitivity and heartlessness.” Patrick’s younger brother Rudy died of leukemia when he was ten and Patrick was twelve. He never got over the loss, and has dedicated seven of his books to the memory of the younger brother he loved so much. Both his mother and father were always broke or absent. Destitute himself much of the time, Patrick wandered the streets and quays alone, was often sent away to boarding schools which he hated. He ran away regularly, read without ceasing, and like many truants (Truffaut comes to mind—see here), he hung out in bookstores and movie theaters. He won literary prizes in the schools he didn’t run away from.

Trying to figure out how his Jewish father, who rarely talked to him, survived during the German Occupation during World War II, he picked up a few details: his father refused to wear the yellow star, carried no identity papers if he even possessed them, escaped from the French Gestapo more than once, avoiding deportation to a concentration camp. But for the most part he remains in the dark about his father’s history and, therefore, his own identity.

For the Traveler

His first novel La Place de l’Étoile (The Place of the Star, 1968), published when he was just twenty-two, reinvents his father as a Jewish Nazi sympathizer and collaborator called Raphael Schlemilovitch. It’s a shock novel, ugly with anti-Semitism, the Gestapo, Auschwitz, betrayal, torture (waterboarding, in particular), Modiano’s anger. It’s the first story in the series of three novels the publishers titled The Occupation Trilogy.

The settings of the trilogy mark the exact locations where the crimes of the Occupation and the collaborators occurred. The novel’s title—the Étoile, with its iconic Arc de Triomphe rising from its center as well as its significance as the symbol the Nazis forced the Jews to wear on their clothing—mocks this site of French military glory. The Étoile during the Occupation is an image of the utter defeat of the French military and the French soul, the pictures of Hitler’s army marching under the Arc de Triomphe on June 14, 1940, combined with the pictures of Jews wearing the yellow star on their clothing are forever inscribed in the city’s collective memory of shame. The Place de l’Étoile (now called Place Charles-de-Gaulle) has twelve avenues radiating in a star shape from the Place, around which traffic flows. At the top of the Arc de Triomphe is an observation platform with a view down the Champs-Élysées, “the major axis of Paris collaboration”1 and of all the other streets.

MÉTRO 1 TO L’ÉTOILE. Open April–Sept, 10–11; Oct–Mar, 10–10:30. Walk through a tunnel from the métro exit to get to the booth for tickets to the top of the Arc. There is also an elevator. The eternal flame of the Unknown Soldier is midway up, on the same level as the ticket booth. The view from the top, at night, is superb.

Modiano shows us this long street as the center of the war’s black market, the quartier where gangsters ran their dirty illegal business. He underscores the moral filth of the racketeers who got rich while most of Paris went hungry. Some also belonged to the French Gestapo whose headquarters were nearby.

The words “Avenue Kléber,” one of the twelve streets ending at the Étoile, named after one of Napoleon’s generals, is invoked in the novel as a refrain signaling the omnipresence of the victorious Nazis; it leads in the other direction to the Boissière quartier and 93, rue Lauriston, another site of Occupation criminality, where the black market gangsters did double duty as members of the French Gestapo. Walk southwest along the avenue Kléber of hotels and offices to rue Boissière—or take the Kléber métro to the Boissière métro—then turn right and walk one block up the hill of rue Boissière to rue Lauriston. (You’re walking in the direction of Place Victor-Hugo.)

Turn left, walk about half a block on the south side to no. 93. In the cellars of this building, now painted a creamy beige, the French Gestapo—as the plaque on the building recounts—interrogated, tortured, and murdered members of the Resistance. The place was notorious during and after the war. Several of Modiano’s scenes in the second novel of the trilogy, The Night Watch, are based on historical records: His main character works for the Resistance and the Gestapo, informing on both to each one, the actual record of Jo Attia.2 The whole operation was under the control of the brutal Bonny-Lafont gang.3 “For some people,” writes Eric Hazan, “the very words rue Lauriston still raise a shudder.”

Ten minutes away on foot (or take the métro to Porte Dauphine), at 84, avenue Foch, the widest avenue in Paris, you will see on the northwest side, the six-story mansion which during the Occupation was the headquarters of the German Gestapo. (The sixteenth arrondissement and Passy, so quiet and orderly, was the favorite neighborhood of the German high command.) There’s a sign on the grass across from the stately mansion: Pelouse Pierre Brossolette. A leader and hero of the Resistance, arrested and tortured here in 1944 (almost a year after Jean Moulin’s mutilated body was brought here from Lyons—see here), Brossolette, afraid that he would finally break and talk, jumped to his death from an open window on the fifth floor to avoid further torture. His remains were transferred to the Panthéon in May 2015.

The crimes of wartime and postwar Paris become Modiano’s story of origin: in other books, too, he describes the dark aftermath of the Occupation, his personal experience of the years of épuration, a kind of civil war in which scores were settled ruthlessly. What he suffered was the betrayal of the “first relationship” as psychology calls it: “my mother … I seldom saw her. I can’t recall a single act of genuine warmth or protectiveness from her.”

The menace of the Occupation recedes in the later books, in which Modiano’s fixation shifts to the processes of memory and his need to find missing persons, who are usually women. He roams the city, his plain sentences an incantatory naming of places: the Pont des Art, Pont Neuf, Vert-Galant, the Louvre, the quays (Conti, Orfèvres, Tournelles, Orsay, Célestins), Pigalle, Clichy, Saint-Germain, Parc Monceau, Pont de l’Alma, the Bois de Boulogne, Hôtel de Ville. “I was happy when I walked the streets of Paris by myself.”4 The names of places come across as fixed points—the only fixed points—familiar, reliable presences. Paris as mother surrogate. But they almost never help him solve the mystery.

In Paris Nocturne, Modiano takes us to the lovely Trocadéro gardens, south of avenue Foch. (Métro: Trocadéro.) Other searches take place along rue de Grenelle; the streets of the Latin Quarter, now lost, as he says, to boutiques and leather shops (In the Café of Lost Youth); of Montparnasse (Suspended Sentences); along the quays (After the Circus); over the Seine bridges. The steep narrow streets of Montmartre (In the Café of Lost Youth) where he imagines the loss of one of his most moving characters, the child-woman, Louki. His love for her is genuine; but she is unknowable, like Paris, her history a secret.

Perhaps his most compelling book, Pedigree (2005), is almost an homage to the saving streets of Montmartre. A memoir of his first twenty-one years, many of its incidents, characters, places will be familiar to readers of his novels. But what comes across toward the end of the book is the narrator’s sudden lightness of being, moments of feeling more insistent than memories of cruel history. He forgives his mother. Despite the horrors, which include his parents’ cold indifference and his city’s wartime past, Modiano now sees the beauty of the world. The vision changes him. The particulars move him.

I spent my days in Montmartre … I felt better there than anywhere else. The metro stop Lamarck-Caulaincourt, with its rising elevator.… For brief moments, I was happy.… The icy handrail on Rue Berthe …

If you climb the steps from the Lamarck-Caulaincourt métro exit up to rue Caulaincourt, as you walk straight ahead and then up the steps into Place Dalida, you can follow Modiano’s wanderings in several directions through the old streets of Montmartre (where the social misfits Vincent van Gogh and Erik Satie lived, painting and composing respectively, both lonely and ridiculed). Despite gentrification and the tourist buses around Sacré-Coeur, it is possible to walk in peace on the butte. Many places recall Montmartre’s layered past: The Allée des Brouillards (“Fog Alley”) to your right, and next to it Square Suzanne-Buisson, Résistante, with the statue of Saint-Denis holding his severed head, his legend the origin of the word “Montmartre”: Mons Martyrum, the mountain of execution. Both Buisson and Saint-Denis were victims of totalitarianism. In the other direction, follow the pretty, slightly uphill rue des l’Abreuvoir, crossing rue des Saules into rue Cortot.

From van Gogh’s rue Lepic (he lived at no. 54, with his brother, Theo, l886–1888), you wind uphill past Le Moulin de la Galette (now a tourist restaurant, on your left as you climb this old quarry road); van Gogh painted it—there were more than twenty-five windmills in his time; he, too, walked the streets of Paris, painted en plein air, and sent postcards to friends. “Paris is Paris … the French air clears up the brain and does one good—a world of good.” Just past the windmill, turn right at the corner into the steep downhill rue de la Miré which ends in rue d’Orchampt. Turn left, walking straight ahead. Rue Ravignan winds left, uphill, forking into several streets.

Here at this small picturesque crossroads, you also find the end of Modiano’s uphill rue Berthe with its handrail still in place, in front of the pharmacy (where Giacometti had his prescriptions filled). Turning to face south (rue Berthe is on your left) you see a welcoming square, with a Wallace fountain in the center, a few benches, and shaded by chestnut trees, Place Émile-Goudeau (formerly called Place Ravignan). Under the breeze of the hilltop you can sit to overlook the steep streets below and in the distance the expanse of the city. Rue Lauriston has its place in that distance—Modiano never denies the dark side—but from up here, his view of Paris has a wider more forgiving focus.

(On the west side of the Place is the restored Bâteau-Lavoir where Picasso and many other artists lived in the early twentieth century, working in penury—no water, no heat, no food. Camus lived up here, on rue Ravignan, when he first came to Paris and lived like a hermit, finishing his novel The Stranger—see here.)

On weekdays, Place Émile-Goudeau offers an unusual haven of solitude in the old village of Montmartre where the ethos of Modriano’s novels feels true: “I was really myself only when I could be alone in the streets.”

Following in Modiano’s footsteps, from Place Émile-Goudeau, climb up to rue Lepic and explore the nearby avenue Junot, rue Norvins, rue Saint-Vincent, and rue du Mont-Cenis where Berlioz lived when he wrote Symphony Fantastique. Or, returning to Place Émile-Goudeau, descend the steep rue Berthe, bearing right into rue des Trois-Frères and then rue Yvonne-le-Tac into Place des Abbesses … You don’t need a map up here. Just keep walking, up and down the narrow cobblestone streets and the long flights of steps, in whatever direction you choose, meandering, forgetting, returning, like the movements of memory itself.

Avoid the butte on weekends, if you can. On weekdays, off-season, there is solitude and a haunting silence and bracing fresh air.

* * *

The multiple personalities of the streets of Paris—dead ends, zero zones, sites of beauty and of memory—have been Modiano’s lifetime companions; the web of streets has shaped his multi-angled consciousness. Sometimes they provide clues about the past. To keep track of them, he lists addresses and phone numbers along with the names of the missing. Not as often as he includes this data but often enough he uses the word “kindness,” for him an important clue in the face of the unknowability of every human being. It was a friend of his mother’s, a kind man, who helped the abandoned teenager move forward, into his future as a writer. Raymond Queneau, the French writer (Zazie in the Métro), read Modiano’s first attempts at a novel; he encouraged him to keep writing and talked about him to his publisher—who would become Modiano’s—Gaston Gallimard. Queneau understood Modiano, saying that he himself was happiest the afternoons he wandered alone on the out-of-the-way streets of his city.

In 2015 Paris recognized Modiano’s historical contribution to the excavation of its hidden shameful memories—and the identification of the thousands of missing persons from the war years—when it named a promenade in the eighteenth arrondissement (Clignancourt) after Dora Bruder, the name of a fifteen-year-old girl who went missing from that neighborhood in 1941. She became the subject of Modiano’s search for her and the focus of his sorrowful meditation on loss, told in the novel Dora Bruder (1997), The Search Warrant in English. He finally tracked her down: her name appeared on the lists of deportees to Auschwitz.

Another young Parisian Jewish woman, Hélène Berr, was found long after she had been deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and then marched to Bergen-Belsen where she was murdered in 1945. Hélène Berr had left behind her voice in her Journal: we meet her during the Occupation when she was a student at the Sorbonne and a volunteer in the underground networks that rescued and smuggled Jewish children out of Paris. Her journal was found after the war and published in 2008.

Patrick Modiano wrote the introduction:

It is necessary to listen to the voice of Hélène and walk by her side. Hers is a voice and a presence that will stay with us for our whole life.

Berr’s philosophical intensity reminds him of Simone Weil (see here), but her desire for happiness as she walks around Paris is different from the ascetic Weil. A best seller in France—24,000 copies sold in two days—Hélène Berr’s Journal is, according to Modiano and many reviewers, “a truly great book.” Her final words in it are from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Horror! Horror! Horror!” The victims of the horror, their loss and namelessness, drive most of Modiano’s searches and meditations. He finds out nothing about Dora Bruder. But Hélène Berr assumes identity in the pages of her memoir, a similar revelation to Modiano’s Pedigree.

She grew up about half an hour away from la butte Montmartre (by métro), just beneath the Eiffel Tower at no. 5 avenue Elisée Reclus, one block south of avenue de la Bourdonnais. The manuscript of Hélène Berr’s Journal is in the archives of the Shoah Memorial, www.memorialdelashoah.org. (In the Marais section of this book—see here.)

Nearby

Roaming around Montmartre as a truant teenager, Modiano spent a lot of time in bookstores.

LIBRAIRIE VENDREDI 67, rue des Martyrs, on the left as you climb north. librairievendredi@wanadoo.fr. A good selection of Modiano’s novels in stock.

LIBRAIRIE DES ABBESSES 30, rue Yvonne-le-Tac, on the right, near the corner, as you head into Place des Abbesses. Excellent, with many Modiano titles in stock and a children’s section.

ANIMA Small, on the left as you climb toward Place Émile-Goudeau on rue des Abbesses.

L’ATTRAPE-COEURS On the left side—4, Place Constantin-Pecqueur—as you approach the stairway up to Place Dalida from Rue Caulincourt. An excellent selection of French titles and some contemporary American writers, with a large children’s section in the back.

LE RELAIS DE LA BUTTE Directly below Place Émile-Goudeau, at the head of a very steep street, a bistro with a large outdoor terrace overlooking the city. Good service, good food, a friendly place to relax under a wide sky.