Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [178]
Although carts usually lumbered up the hill loaded with wheat to be ground into flour or grapes to be pressed for wine, some wagons brought grimmer burdens. Montmartre’s height made it a strategic point whenever the city was attacked, and cannons mounted here fired on the Russians in 1814 and the Prussians during the Commune of 1871.
Peace restored, the Moulin de la Galette became a popular guinguette. Parisians loved Sunday promenades to the butte, where millers and their wives offered fresh milk and galettes, or cakes, made from their flour. Now they could spend the afternoon at an outdoor dance hall. In 1876, Renoir immortalized the moulin in his joyous painting of Parisians in their Sunday best, dancing and flirting in the dappled sunshine.
The guinguette is gone now—replaced by an apartment building. And of Montmartre’s many mills, just one other remains—you’ll pass the Moulin Radet at the next corner, several blocks before rue Lepic ends at the Place Jean-Baptiste-Clément.
Paul Verlaine, who knew both the glory and misery of the city’s streets, described them poetically in La Bonne chanson:
Le bruit des cabarets, la fange des trottoirs,
Les platanes déchus s’effeuillant dans l’air,
Toits qui dégouttent, murs suintants, pavé qui glisse,
Bitume défoncé, ruisseaux comblant l’égout,
Voilà ma route, avec le paradis au bout.
With Verlaine’s verse in mind and Hillairet in hand, I look forward to discovering many more streets of desire.
Paint the Town
PARIS MUSE
THIS TERRIFIC PIECE—about three paintings that tell the story of Paris in three episodes: Regency, Revolution, and Republic—is adapted from two tours, the History of Paris in Paintings at the Louvre, and the Age of the Impressionists at the Musée d’Orsay, offered by Paris Muse. This unique company offers private tours in Paris museums that have been described as “small and delicious” as opposed to “an all-you-can-eat buffet.” Founded in 2002, Paris Muse is the complete opposite of a large-group tour operator, never booking more than four people to a museum tour (but larger walking tours are also available). Guides, who are trained and experienced art historians, are native English speakers living in Paris doing graduate work or preparing publications related to art history. Tours are offered in about a dozen Paris museums, and there are two great tours for families. Visit the Paris Muse Web site, parismuse.com, for more details and to sign up for its Quoi de Neuf? newsletter. I subscribe and really enjoy it.
THE HISTORY OF Paris is often told as a story of rulers, the monuments they built, and the wars that knocked them down. In the painted visions of its artists, there is another, subtler version of that history. Before the late nineteenth century, very few Paris painters turned their eye on the actual city itself. They painted their cultural moment instead, capturing the spirit and ideas of their age in much the same way movies or popular novels do today. That’s why, when we visit the city’s museums today, if we are not always looking at paintings of Paris, we are often looking at paintings about Paris. The gilded frames that hang in the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay are windows into the minds of its past residents. With a little background we can begin to read them, to see how three paintings in particular speak to the preoccupations and desires of Parisians who lived during key episodes in the city’s history: Regency, Revolution, and Republic.
At first blush nothing could seem further removed from eighteenth-century Paris than the idyllic country setting in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (1717, Louvre, Sully Wing, 2nd floor, Gallery 36). Eight couples are making their way to a gilded boat that readies for sail. Each pair enacts a stage in the progress of seduction, their bodies forming an undulating ribbon across the surface of Watteau’s luminous landscape. At one end, a man in a blue cape