Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [177]
Twenty-five years later, when he was received into the Académie, he bought his long-desired sanctuary—a little country house picturesquely covered in vines, with gardens stretching to the hameau’s present-day entrance at 38 rue Boileau. He frequently entertained guests here, and Racine, a frequent visitor, wrote, “He’s happy as a king in his solitude, or rather in his inn at Auteuil.”
In the early nineteenth century, when financial speculators discovered Auteuil, Boileau’s former property was subdivided. Today’s houses, in a private community surrounded by woods, range from neoclassic to Art Deco in style, but most have the look of luxurious country homes. The most striking one is a turreted Gothic-style fantasy that dominates the avenue Despréaux.
Strolling along those tranquil roads under massive chestnut trees, I found it hard to believe that a short walk would take me to the Michel-Ange-Molitor Métro stop. The cynical Boileau would not be surprised to learn that, over three hundred years later, money still buys country calm in the city.
RUE LEPIC
The magic of Montmartre is easy to miss. It disappears in the traffic and tourist traps, especially in the Place du Tertre. But the butte has old, romantic streets that are well worth seeing, and rue Lepic brings together all that is characteristic and captivating in this former village.
Before this street was built, Montmartre was a leafy hill covered in vineyards and topped with windmills. A hamlet at the top clustered around the place and its church—not Sacré-Coeur, but the much older Saint-Pierre—and thatched cottages on narrow lanes housed millers, workmen, artists, and quarry workers who dug the gypsum that made plaster of Paris.
One steep road, today’s rue Ravignan, linked the village to Paris for centuries, until the day in 1809 when Napoléon I rode out to inspect a new telegraph apparatus. Forced to dismount halfway up the hill and continue on foot, the emperor was not amused. Construction soon began on the rue de l’Empereur (now rue Lepic), which climbs the hill in a gentle curve.
It starts down at the Place Blanche, named for the permanent blanket of white powder left by plaster carts. Just off the place stands the famous Montmartre institution called the Moulin Rouge, where high-kicking dancers displayed petticoat ruffles, shapely legs, and occasionally a total lack of underwear.
Opened in 1889 (and still kicking, with several shows nightly), the Moulin Rouge in its glory days is shown on a mural near the theater’s entrance at 82 boulevard de Clichy. Toulouse-Lautrec sits at his usual table sketching dancers including slender Valentin le Désossé (the Boneless) and chubby Louise Weber, nicknamed La Goulue (the Glutton).
From Place Blanche, rue Lepic climbs through a lively market into a residential quartier where another artist once lived. Vincent van Gogh spent two years at no. 54 with his brother Theo, an art dealer who introduced him to Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and Gauguin. Under their influence his palette evolved from somber neutrals to brighter colors before he left for Arles in 1888. Artists’ studios still stand on rue Lepic and neighboring streets like rue de l’Armée-d’Orient—look for buildings with large north-facing windows and skylights.
Van Gogh may have climbed this same stretch of rue Lepic when he was painting Le Moulin à Montmartre. At no. 77, I find his model. An arched gateway carries the name Moulin de la Galette, and looking up through the trees I see the windmill, tantalizingly inaccessible since it is now on private property. Of all the sites in Montmartre, this may be the one most loaded with history.
By the Middle Ages, Paris’s highest hill, where the Romans once had a temple to Mars, supported some thirty windmills. This one, built in 1621, stands on the site of a thirteenth-century predecessor. So famous were these mills that in 1570 the Italian poet Tasso