Bal Bullier

The place, briefly

François Bullier opened his dance garden in 1847 on the site of an old closerie planted with lilacs — and when the dancing moved indoors behind a gaudy mock-oriental façade, the lilac name crossed the road to the café opposite, which still carries it. For the rest of the century 'the Bullier' was where the Latin Quarter danced: students, grisettes, painters, and every memoirist of Bohemian Paris passed through its gates on the Avenue de l'Observatoire.

The era on our shelves knew it two ways. For the painters it was subject matter — Sonia Delaunay's great Bal Bullier canvases of 1913 turned its electric-lit dancers into pure simultaneous color. For the writers it was a landmark you navigated by: Huddleston's merriest Pound evening happened in the upper room chez Émile on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, 'next to the mock Oriental building of the Bal Bullier,' with Ford and Pound playing with ideas for hours across the road from the Closerie.

Blaise Cendrars belonged to those nights. He came with the Delaunays in the seasons when Sonia Delaunay was wearing her first simultaneous dresses onto the Bullier's floor, and the Centre Pompidou connects his 1913 poem on one of those dresses directly to this world — the hall's electric light and movement passing straight into the new poetry.

The hall did not survive the Second World War era, and the site passed to the university; a student center on the renamed Avenue Georges Bernanos keeps the Bullier name. The dancing survives only in the paintings, the memoirs — and in the name of the café across the boulevard, which was the bal's before it was anyone's.