Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [166]
Café life in Saint-Germain observed certain conventions. Sartre noted that ‘people would come in and find they knew everybody; each person knew the smallest details about the private life of their neighbour; but one did not bother to say bonjour, although one would immediately if one met any of them elsewhere’.
Before 1944, when the effects of his fame became too distracting, Sartre used to work at the Café Flore for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. The morning session began with him bustling through the door, his pockets stuffed with books and papers. He threaded his way through to his favourite corner table, settled down, lit his pipe, downed a couple of Cognacs while spreading out his papers and started to write.
The proprietor of the Flore, Paul Boubal, at first had no idea of his customer’s identity. He often came with a dark-haired woman, who also wrote – in the same corner of the café, but at a different table. They left at twelve, but came back after lunch and worked in the room on the first floor till closing time.
One day there was a telephone call for a Monsieur Sartre. Boubal had a personal friend called Sartre and told the caller he was not in the café. The caller insisted that he must be, so Boubal called out the name – and up stood the little man with the pipe and pebble glasses. ‘From that moment he became my friend, and we often had a chat in the morning; later, the telephone calls increased to such an extent that I decided it was necessary to put in another line specially for him.’
The famille Sartre and the bande Prévert used to patronize both the Flore and the Deux Magots. The great period of the Deux Magots had been between the wars, when – according to Vercors – the café was so filled with celebrated artists, politicians and men of letters that it was almost impossible to find a place; particularly since young disciples would bring up chairs and sit two or three deep round the tiny tables, listening attentively to the conversation of the great figures. Yet by the late 1930s the Flore had also gathered an impressive group of regulars which included not only the bande Prévert, but also André Breton, Picasso and Giacometti. Towards the end of the afternoon, people often drifted to the Deux Magots, where they could enjoy the last of the sunlight.
Communists, if they were not in Marguerite Duras’s apartment in the rue Saint-Benoît, favoured the Bonaparte, on the north side of the Place Saint-Germain, while musicians tended to gravitate towards the Royal Saint-Germain, opposite the Deux Magots on the south side of the Boulevard. In the evening other places came into their own: the Rhumerie Martiniquaise, the Bar Vert and the bar of the Hotel Montana.
The central point of this café life was the square between the Deux Magots and the ancient, much rebuilt abbey of Saint Germain-des-Prés. The frontiers of the quartier were clearly defined: on the east, the Boulevard Saint-Michel; on the west, the rue des Saints-Pères; on the north, the quais along the Seine; on the south, the rue de Vaugirard. The narrow streets were still cobbled then, gently dipping between tall houses that leaned this way and that. Roofs, stucco, bricks, cobbles, shutters and paintwork provided every shade of grey fromzinc to soot. Occasionally, when the large door of a porte-cochère was open, one might catch sight of a courtyard with a few shrubs and potted geraniums; otherwise the only green was that of the leaves of the plane trees on the broad boulevards.
As it was considered bourgeois to have an apartment, young intellectuals lived in dilapidated hotels, which came to symbolize the rootless and unmaterialistic life of an existentialist.