BOULEVARD HAUSSMANN – MARCEL PROUST (1871–1922)
Marcel Proust lived most of his childhood and early adulthood in Boulevard Malesherbes, a three-minute walk from L’église de la Madeleine. Gabriel Fauré was the church’s resident organist at this time and Fauré’s first violin sonata, written when Proust was just four years old, is thought by some to be the inspiration for the ‘little phrase’ that infiltrates Swann’s mind in the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu.
These days there’s a Bowen shoe shop on the ground floor of this identikit Baron Haussmann apartment block. My wife looked inside while I took some photos and tried to get a feel for this area which Proust called ‘one of the ugliest parts of town’. The writer loved his parents dearly, but clearly wished they had not chosen to raise him in this upwardly-mobile arrondissement. Proust’s spiritual home was Faubourg St Germain where France’s superannuated aristocrats were sitting out their decline in grand townhouses, or hôtels particuliers.
In 1905, after the death of both his parents, the 34-year-old Proust moved not to his beloved St Germain but no distance at all to an apartment that had belonged to his maternal uncle. Because his adored mother had taken him to visit the apartment, Proust claimed that it exercised ‘a tender and melancholy attraction’. Here on the second floor of 102 Boulevard Haussman the author lived from 1906 to 1919, penning his seven-volume masterwork and growing increasingly eccentric as he wrote through the night and slept through the day in his cork-lined bedroom.
It’s a seven-minute walk between the two apartments – and an interesting one too because you pass the Chapelle expiatoire dedicated to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The king’s body was initially interred here in this former cemetery with his guillotined head at his feet.
Arriving on Boulevard Haussmann we immediately noticed No. 102 across the road because it is now a prominent bank. In 1919 Proust’s aunt sold the building to the banker René Varin-Bernier and her dispossessed nephew had to leave. The name Banque R. Varin-Bernier et Cie. is still inscribed on the cornice above the entrance, although a modern plastic sign confirms that it now trades as Bank CIC. A stone plaque on one of the pillars supporting the cornice announces that Marcel Proust ‘habita cet immeuble de 1907 à 1919’. We both found it odd to think of him working away for twelve years at one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century above what is now the CIC Bank.
Towards the end of his eccentric – to put it mildly – life, Proust ventured out only at night. He once met James Joyce when the two men shared a cab, but Joyce recorded that they said very little to each other because he was tired and on his way to bed. ‘Of course the situation was impossible,’ wrote Joyce. ‘Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.’ On another occasion Proust rushed to the Louvre to check on a picture he wished to write about and was surprised to find the gallery was not open at midnight.
Fortunately our personal recherche for Proust was more successful at the Musée Carnavalet in Marais, just north of Notre-Dame. This museum was Baron Haussmann’s idea. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on him that having destroyed much of old Paris for the grandiose ambitions of Emperor Napoleon III, he created a museum to celebrate its lost history.
The museum contains the shoes of Marie-Antoinette and a ring made of her hair. There’s also a document that Robespierre had not finished signing when he was dragged away under arrest, as well as Napoleon’s favourite toiletry case, Émile Zola’s gold watch and the cradle in which Napoleon III’s son was rocked. There are also a number of paintings of busy nineteenth-century Paris that could be illustrations for À la recherche du temps perdu. But best of all is a recreation of Proust’s bedroom, with his brass bedstead and furniture brought from various apartments in which he lived. There’s a chaise and armchair, two small tables and a desk. I was very pleased to see the original cork wall tiles that lined his apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Proust could not bear distraction, so he worked with the windows closed and sound-proofed his room with these rectangular tiles.
Not surprisingly, by the end of his life the lack of sunshine and an abundance of cigarettes had taken its toll of an already delicate constitution. Céleste Albaret, Proust’s servant, recorded taking him a croissant and having to push aside the heavy curtain that kept his door draught-proof: ‘The smoke was so thick you could have cut it with a knife … All I could see of M. Proust was a white shirt under a thick sweater, and the upper part of his body propped against two pillows.’
She added that she couldn’t actually make out Proust’s visage at all in the fug and gloom: ‘I bowed toward the invisible face and put the saucer with the croissant down on the tray. He gave a wave of the hand, presumably to thank me, but didn’t say a word.’
Proust began and completed most of À la recherche du temps perdu in a smoky version of this room. In 1919 when the building was sold, after a brief stay with an actress friend (whose neighbours he could hear making love), Proust ended up at 44 Rue Hamelin with Céleste Albaret and her husband. Today this building near what is now Place Marlene Dietrich is the three-star Hotel Élysée Union and a plaque on its facade reads: ‘Marcel Proust se réfugie 44 Rue Hamelin, où il meurt le 18 novembre 1922’.
Poor Proust. He dreamed of the hôtels particuliers of Faubourg St Germain but ended his days in what is now a commercial hotel – and a three-star one at that!
FOUQUET’S, AVENUE DES CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES – JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941)
Ernest Hemingway once wrote of walking penniless through Paris with his wife Hadley and seeing James Joyce holding court in a warm, fine, brightly-lit restaurant. Given the location Hem describes, it was probably Fouquet’s, but knowing Hemingway’s ability to conjure up true events that never happened, it might easily have been any number of other restaurants. It might never have happened at all.
What is true is that James Joyce spent far more time in Paris than he ever did in Dublin. And that he wrote exclusively about the latter while living in the former.
Joyce first visited Paris in 1902 as a hungry student lodging in the Latin Quarter, wondering if he should become a doctor, and reading all day in the National Library. He returned in 1920 aged 38 at the invitation of expatriate American poet Ezra Pound. Joyce and his common-law wife Nora Barnacle, along with their two children, ended up living in Paris for the next twenty years. Here he worked on Finnegans Wake and here Sylvia Beach published Ulysses from her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, at 12 Rue de l’Odéon.
Finding James Joyce’s Paris is not like looking for Joyce’s Dublin. Books have been devoted to the locations that Joyce recreated on paper from his memories of Dublin – and many of the sites still look as he knew them before his self-imposed exile. But Paris was never Joyce’s and today it’s hard to track down his ghost. We know that he spent sixteen years here wrestling with Finnegans Wake and living off grants of money from the wealthy English philanthropist, Harriet Shaw Weaver. We know that he saw his status as an avant-garde writer rise sky-high while he lived in Paris, even as his own eyesight deteriorated to near-blindness. By the time Joyce left Paris for Switzerland, after the Nazi invasion of France, he was unable to go out on his own. In his last weeks there he would stand on the Pont de l’Alma with his secretary, Paul Léon, unable to even make out the Seine flowing below.
In my sentimental imaginings of Joyce as an Irish émigré I thought of him frequenting the Left Bank cafés of Paris. Instead, as he grew solvent and even prosperous, he preferred to eat at Fouquet’s restaurant at 99 Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
On one memorable Boxing Day in 1937 the Joyces dined at Fouquet’s in the company of Samuel Beckett and Peggy Guggenheim. That evening was the beginning of a brief but very intense affair between Beckett and Guggenheim. Peggy had been invited to eat with Joyce and Nora, as well as Joyce’s son Giorgio and his wife Helen, a friend of Peggy’s from New York. There’s no record of what Joyce ordered that evening at Fouquet’s, although he often just chewed on raw garlic and drank his favourite wine, Fendant de Sion, while others ate. Whether this was to save money or calories I don’t know, but his correspondence with Nora suggests he loved food.
Beckett, a guest of the Joyces that evening, was 31 years old to Joyce’s 55. Peggy was 39. She had met the handsome Irishman on a couple of occasions before, and after the dinner at Fouquet’s they went for drinks to Giorgio and Helen’s flat. Later Beckett offered to escort Peggy home, and the couple ended up spending not just that night but the whole of the following day in bed together, having sex and drinking champagne. The affair resumed shortly afterwards when Peggy was caretaking a friend’s home in Montparnasse and Beckett stayed with her for a week. Then it petered out.
Beckett dined with Joyce again on 4 January 1938. A few days later Beckett was stabbed in the street by a pimp named Prudent and taken to hospital unconscious. Joyce was one of the first visitors to the hospital. At his insistence, and expense, Beckett was moved to a private room and received the best medical care.
These expatriates of Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation lived ordinary creative lives, devoting hours to the tasks of writing and worrying about paying bills, but what we remember when we think of Paris in the 20s and 30s is the bravado, the bad behaviour and the stories they told about each other. I particularly like Hemingway’s claim that Joyce would enjoy provoking younger, more agile men in bars and then hide behind his athletic friend and yell, ‘Deal with him, Hemingway, deal with him!!!’
Sitting in Fouquet’s today on the corner of the Champs-Élysées and Avenue George V, it’s clear that the restaurant with its distinctive red canopy and wood-panelled walls has gone some way upmarket since the days when Joyce downed his bottles of Fendant de Sion. The interior is full of photos of French movie stars because the Champs-Élysées is where many films are premiered in France, and at Fouquet’s those who triumph in Cannes are treated to the ‘meal of the winners’.
The restaurant, with its tables screened from the road by low green hedges, serves typical French brasserie food including les escargots gros and foie gras de Fouquet. There are some extravagant puddings too, like dessert haute couture de Mayu Asada, named after the Japanese movie star. Dining at Fouquet’s is now a symbol of luxury and wealth in itself. Many of its midweek clientele are refreshing themselves after an intense morning’s shopping at the enormous Louis Vuitton flagship store across the road. It’s a world away from James Joyce, but I still found it easy to imagine Hemingway and Hadley walking past and gazing hungrily in.
Assuming that ever happened, of course.
HÔTEL LANCASTER – ERICH MARIA REMARQUE (1898–1970)
German novelist Erich Maria Remarque lived a dramatic life. Wounded and invalided out of the First World War, he penned Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) in the 1920s while writing copy for a tyre manufacturer and working as a librarian and journalist. It took him two years to find a publisher for his anti-war novel, but the book’s success in 1929 – and its Oscar-winning screen adaptation a year later – made him a literary star. The novel also made him enemies in the Nazi party. On 10 May 1933, the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, had Remarque’s pacifist works banned and publicly burned.
Living in Switzerland, safely beyond the reach of the Fatherland, Remarque led a double life, writing serious, compassionate books about the turmoil in Europe while using his earnings to date movie stars and collect paintings by Van Gogh and Cézanne.
In 1938, after the publication of Drei Kameraden (Three Comrades), a book that many believe inspired the film The Deer Hunter, he began an affair with actress Marlene Dietrich in Venice. She brought him with her when she returned to Paris. Marlene explained to her young daughter Maria that the novelist had told her at their first meeting that he was impotent and that she had replied, ‘How wonderful!’ La Dietrich had often confided to her daughter how she hated to do ‘it’ and how she much preferred talking and sleeping in bed.
In Paris Remarque was working on Liebe deinen Nächsten (published in English as Flotsam). The novel describes the stories of a number of characters who flee Germany at the time of National Socialism. Published in 1939, it too would be filmed in the US, as So Ends Our Night with Fredric March and Margaret Sullavan.
Marlene arranged for Remarque – whom she called ‘Boni’ – to stay with her at Hôtel Lancaster in Paris while the fourteen-year-old Maria was sent to stay nearby at the Hôtel Windsor.
The Lancaster, just off the Champs-Élysées, had been opened in 1924 by the Swiss hotelier Émile Wolf. It’s a small hotel that has always prided itself on its discretion and is decorated with valuable antiques that Wolf and his staff found in Paris auction rooms. Many bedrooms are hung with original oil paintings by Boris Pastoukhoff, a Ukrainian artist who fled the Russian revolution in 1917 and financed his decade at the Lancaster by regularly presenting Mr Wolf with pictures in lieu of payment. Wolf always intended the Lancaster to be an hôtel particulier where guests took suites for an extended period of time – and only after being personally introduced. Marlene’s husband had found her the hotel in 1937 and she lived there intermittently with various lovers until the outbreak of the Second World War.
Today the hotel doesn’t look much different from how it appeared in 1938 when Remarque was installed in Room 401, although the levels of comfort have been discreetly enhanced and the carpets removed to reveal original 1920s parquet. I stayed in this room – now known as the Marlene Suite – soon after it was restored in 2012, and very comfortable it was too. Marlene’s grandson, a Hollywood designer, had overseen the redesign using a lilac palette based on her favourite colour and brought in new furniture inspired by originals found in Marlene’s New York apartment. The refurb had retained the original grand piano and there were lilies everywhere, in tribute to Marlene’s habit of deluging the hotel with flowers.
In 1938 the suite was actually twice the size it is now. The section that was kept just for Marlene’s clothes is now another whole suite. What interested me, however, was the bathroom. It’s nowhere near as remarkable as the rest of 401, but it tells an unusual story.
One day in 1938 young Maria came to meet her mother and found two men with swastika armbands guarding the door to her mother’s suite. The German foreign minister, Ulrich von Ribbentrop, had called on Marlene to ask her to return to Germany and become part of the Third Reich’s film industry. She graciously declined and, after Ribbentrop left, Marlene instructed Maria to release Herr Remarque from the bathroom. Convinced the Nazis were after her lover because of his pacifist views and desertion of the Fatherland, Marlene had locked him in when Ribbentrop turned up. Remarque came out furious at his undignified imprisonment.
‘Oh, my only love!’ Dietrich insisted, ‘I was only frightened for you! You know how they hate you!’
The high farce of this story does not find its way into any of Remarque’s fiction.
When war broke out a year later, Marlene returned to the US with Remarque, who was travelling on a Panamanian passport. In 1940 the Wehrmacht marched into Paris and Mr Wolf’s canny staff raised the owner’s Swiss flag to make sure that no German soldiers were billeted on them. As a result, the Lancaster survived the Second World War without having any of its antiques or artwork plundered.
Remarque stayed in the US for some years, eventually marrying the actress Paulette Goddard when he finally realised Marlene would never be his. She admired his talent but didn’t like how drunk he would get in the evenings. According to Maria, rather than being broken-hearted, Marlene was furious that Goddard would get all his priceless oil paintings.
Alcoholic or not, Remarque continued to be a hugely successful novelist during his time in America and then back in Switzerland, where he lived out the rest of his life after leaving the US in 1948. His last novel Die Nacht von Lissabon (The Night in Lisbon), published in 1962, sold nearly a million copies in Germany alone. He continued to correspond with Dietrich and a selection of their letters was published in 2003 as Sag Mir, Dass Du Mich Liebst (Tell Me That You Love Me) and later turned into a stage play.
These days the Lancaster is a popular choice for movie stars attending premieres on the Champs-Élysées. In 1967 Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor stayed in Room 701 for the French premiere of Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew. Fortunately their suite was at the top of its own flight of stairs where, so the manager informed me, other guests could not hear their violent arguments.
LES DEUX MAGOTS, SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS – JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905–80)
Les Deux Magots, taking its name from the two incongruous statues of Chinese merchants fixed so high above the clientele they almost touch the ceiling, is famous on the Paris tourist trail in a way that Café de Flore, the more overtly intellectual café next door, is not. Flore was considered right-wing in the 1930s, so when Jean-Paul Sartre arrived in Paris in 1937 to teach at Lycée Pasteur he gravitated towards Les Deux Magots. It had been a favourite of the previous generation of artists, the Hemingways and Picassos, who had enjoyed the real pleasure of Paris in the 20s.
Auguste Boulay, who had been running this café in a former fabric shop since 1914, wasn’t political but his clientele – defining themselves in opposition to Charles Maurras, founder of the nationalist Action Française who had written his manifesto in Café de Flore – gave Les Deux Magots its reputation. It became left-wing by default. In 1933 Boulay had created its own (ever so slightly left-leaning) literary prize, which the café continues to fund.
In 1939 Sartre had to give up the comforts of Deux Magots’ banquettes and marbled-topped tables when he was drafted into the French army. He was assigned to meteorological duties and denied a rifle because of his poor eyesight. In 1940 during the fall of France, Sartre was captured and spent nine months as a prisoner of war before being released in 1941 and returned to civilian life. He was given a position at Lycée Condorcet in Paris, replacing a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by the Vichy regime, and settled into Mistral on Rue Cels, one of his favourite Paris hotels.
Deux Magots, two kilometres north along Rue de Rennes from Hôtel Mistral, was a good place for the pipe-smoking philosopher to walk to for the serious business of writing and tobacco. It was here that Sartre discussed resistance to the German occupation with his mistress Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, concluding eventually that it was better to write than fight. In their case probably wisely too. It was also here that Sartre worked on his proposed tetralogy, Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) while de Beauvoir (on a separate table) wrote her tale of immortality, Tous les hommes sont mortels (All Men are Mortal). Here too Sartre wrote a pen portrait of the typical Parisian waiter: ‘He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly, his eyes express an interest too solicitous for the order of the customer.’
I’ve been intimidated by waiters like that myself. I remember being caught looking at the brass plaques on the backs of the banquettes in Deux Magots a little too intensely by an overly-attentive waiter. I felt judged by the man in his crisp white shirt and black apron. He clearly had marked me down as ‘tourist’. But if you put plaques with names like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Hemingway on your seats, you’re going to attract that kind of trade.
With the waiter hovering I was caught between ordering the Petit Déjeuner Hemingway and the Petit Déjeuner JP Sartre. Both cost 26 euros and you get two Danish pastries with the Sartre and fried egg and bacon with the Hem. Instead I just asked for a double espresso, sipped my coffee too quickly, and felt obliged to leave once the cup was empty. I’ve never managed the European way of renting a table by making your coffee last all morning. Perhaps that time-killing aspect is why French intellectuals smoked so much.
Ask any Parisian intellectual today – and there is no shortage – and you will be told that just as the reputation of Sartre drew would-be philosophers and writers to Deux Magots in the 50s and 60s, so all the tourists who followed in their wake have since driven the thinkers away. Flore, having been shunned for its 1930s anti-Semitism and the legacy of Charles Maurras, is now where the intelligent coffee-drinker goes to occupy his or her table.
Deux Magots is now run by Catherine Mathivat, the great-great granddaughter of Auguste Boulay. Through brass signs and menu choices she has ensured that it has cornered the market as the philosophers’ café on the Left Bank as far as tourists are concerned. Actually after the Second World War de Beauvoir and Sartre decamped to the bar of the Pont-Royal Hotel on Rue du Bac in the 7th arrondissement, having grown fed up of being gawped at by literary groupies. In 1949, by now a leading figure in French literature, Sartre was stung by the review for the third instalment of Les Chemins de la liberté and never completed the fourth. He retired to another arrondissement entirely, to lick his wounds, polish his glasses and garner award after award.
Some revisionists will tell you that during the war Sartre eschewed Les Deux Magots when it became too popular with officers from the Wehrmacht. I’ve even read that during the harsh winter of 1943–4 the warm stove upstairs at Café de Flore caused Sartre to forget all about its right-wing reputation and decamp next door. But then Paris would not be Paris without some sharp disagreement between those who consider themselves intellectuals.