Montparnasse

The place, briefly

Montparnasse became the centre of artistic Paris because Montmartre got expensive. Around 1910 the painters started crossing the river for cheaper studios, and within fifteen years the crossroads at Vavin held four cafés — the Dôme, the Rotonde, the Select and the Coupole — that between them functioned as a labour exchange, a poste restante and a bank for anyone in Europe trying to make art without money.

The economics were specific. A studio in the Villa Seurat or the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs cost a fraction of Montmartre. The cafés extended credit. Models, dealers and rivals could all be found at the same tables within an hour, which mattered enormously before telephones were common in cheap flats. Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, Foujita and Zadkine worked here. So, later, did most of the Americans.

Ernest Hemingway's second Paris flat was above a sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He drafted much of The Sun Also Rises at the Closerie des Lilas in a six-week burst in the autumn of 1925, and set a good deal of the novel in the cafés a few streets away. F. Scott Fitzgerald introduced himself to him at the Dingo Bar on the rue Delambre, two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published.

By the time James Baldwin arrived in 1948 the artistic capital had shifted again, back across the river towards Saint-Germain, and Montparnasse had become somewhere you went rather than somewhere you were. That is roughly how Giovanni's Room uses it. David walks there. Early in the book, standing at Guillaume's bar and wishing he had the nerve to leave, he thinks about going over to Montparnasse instead. Later, having read the letter that tells him Hella is coming back to Paris, he pays for his drink and walks across the river to Montparnasse, then down Raspail towards its cafés, remembering that he and Hella had walked there together. It is where he goes when he is trying not to be where he was.

What he goes there to do is the part usually left out. Baldwin states it without softening: his real fear was buried and was driving him to Montparnasse, and he wanted to find a girl, any girl at all. The terraces are oddly deserted that evening. He walks both sides of the street looking at the tables, recognises nobody, gets as far as the Closerie des Lilas for one solitary drink, and comes back up the boulevard past two French prostitutes he decides he can do better than. At the Select he finds Sue, an American girl he hardly knows, and goes back with her to her flat on the rue de Sèvres. Lying there afterwards he works out that what he did with Giovanni could not possibly have been more immoral than what he has just done here.

So the quarter that spent thirty years advertising itself as the place where anything was permitted is, in this book, where a man goes to arrange something he intends to use against himself. The cafés are the same ones Hemingway seats his cast in. The errand is not.

The quarter's own decline is easy to date and hard to mourn, because it was replaced by something worse. The Tour Montparnasse went up in 1973, fifty-nine floors of dark glass over a quarter of five-storey stone, and the city banned buildings over seven storeys in the centre shortly afterwards. The tower is generally agreed to have been a mistake, which is why the joke about it has survived sixty years: the view from the top is the best in Paris, because it is the only one without the tower in it.

The four cafés at Vavin are all still open, all expensive, and all trading partly on the names of people who could not have afforded them. That is not hypocrisy so much as arithmetic. What is genuinely gone is the cheap studio, which is what the quarter actually ran on.