Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [7]
The cabaret scene in Montmartre provided entertainment for every taste, even the tantalizingly perverse. Picasso’s companion Carles Casagemas wrote home that his favorite haunts were the next-door-neighbor cabarets named Ciel (Heaven) and Infer (Hell) — and a third named Néant, or Nothingness. At the Cabaret du Ciel, patrons entered gates lit by blue-tinted electric lights, with the action starting at 11:00 P.M. Inside, the ceiling was painted blue, with stars and clouds; paintings of saints and angels lined the corridors. Another visitor described his experiences here around 1910:
The head waiter greets visitors with a blasphemous welcome that need not be set down.… Suddenly from among the clouds at the end of the room St. Peter appears, keys at girdle, a mysterious vessel in one hand; he sprinkles the nearest devotees with his imitation of holy water and disappears. The waiters now assemble before a shrine at the end of the room, on which a gilt pig sits enshrined. They light candles and perform genuflections. From the pulpit at the other side of the café a man dressed as a preacher delivers an unprintable discourse. Then after a procession of Angel garçons the assembled guests, being duly sanctified, file out of the “Home of the Angels,” St. Peter himself being in the passage to give out tickets.… You pass out to the street, meeting Father Time at the exit with his hourglass turned up to receive the contributions of those who wish to enjoy a long life.
In the Cabaret du Néant you can see a body put into a coffin and turn into a skeleton before your eyes, and return again to healthy life. You are attended by mutes, and the drinks supplied are called by the names of various hideous diseases. Outside the Cabaret of Hell you are greeted by a red devil with horns and trident, who bids you enter and be d——d, for Satan is calling for you. And if you care to go inside, Satan will be heard delivering a discourse, strange medley of morality and blasphemy. 17
Cafés and cabarets also dotted Montparnasse, on the other bank of the Seine. Especially popular was La Closerie des Lilas, 18 a café on the boulevard Montparnasse, adjacent to the Latin Quarter, where many students from the University of Paris lived. Vladimir Lenin, then an exile from Russia, lived in Paris from 1901 to 1912. And though he much preferred London as a city (he described Paris as a “foul hole”), he did have drinks sometimes at the Closerie des Lilas. 19 Across the street was Bal Bullier, which held a weekly grande fête for students, artists, and workers, who danced in its backyard gardens under colored lights. In the spring, costumed art students paraded in the Bal Bullier. One who did so remembered “students and artists, handsome and merry in their stunning velvet suits and floppy slouch hats, and with their girls, some in their cycling bloomers, others in silk robes, and still others in summer blouses.” 20 The Café Dôme’s proprietors welcomed visitors and new arrivals, and it became a gathering place for foreign artists. The Cabaret de la Rotonde, which opened around 1911, was called “the navel of the world” at the height of its popularity. 21 It attracted such Russian revolutionaries as Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Anatoly Lunacharsky and was the favorite café of the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. Also to be found there were the Mexican painter Diego Rivera and the Russian artists Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine.
Gino Severini, an Italian, arrived in Paris in October 1906. A friend of Picasso and Apollinaire, he was to become a leader of the Italian futurists, who pursued their own kind of modernism and sought to incorporate speed, energy, and force into their works. “Few have ever arrived in an unfamiliar city as penniless and hopeless as I was,” he wrote. “I had no friends, no money (barring 50 francs I counted