The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (6 page)

As we stood in front of the sushi shop at No. 32, Michel told me to look at the buildings across the street and down toward the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Church. “We are seeing the rue des Martyrs exactly as it was in 1840,” he said.

To prepare for my tour with Michel, I had done some research on my own; I wanted to show my stuff. I suggested we turn left, onto the rue de Navarin. At No. 9, I pointed out a Gothic Revival house that looks like a miniature cathedral. “Didn’t it used to be a brothel?” I said. Across the street, I added, the Hôtel Amour has erotic photographs in rooms that can be rented by the week, by the day, or for “nooners” (noon to three p.m., for about one hundred euros). Michel raised an eyebrow as if to suggest that the rate seemed rather pricey.

The hotel is so cool that its restaurant has offerings like lobster sandwiches, eggs Benedict, and gluten-free carrot cake. All its wines are made with organically grown grapes and, according to the menu, “a lot of love.” Its exterior briefly appeared in a commercial for Love Story, Chloé’s orange-blossom-and-jasmine-based perfume. French actress Clémence Poésy, dressed in ivory-hued mousseline, floats through a romantic Paris night under the spell of a visibly smitten beau. When morning comes, she dumps him. Meanwhile, “Mi Amor,” sung by Vanessa Paradis, plays in the background.

“This is a modern, rock’n’roll, secret woman,” said actress-director Mélanie Laurent, who filmed the commercial—and lives in the neighborhood. “And most of all, this is a free woman.”

As we walked up the left side of the rue des Martyrs, I told Michel to slow down. “The Sacré-Coeur is about to appear,” I said. We caught a glimpse of a small dome on the left. Then we stopped at the corner of the rue Manuel, where the large central dome and a second small dome came into view, chalky white against a blue sky.

Émile Zola, who lived in the neighborhood while Sacré-Coeur was being built, was among those who hated its design and its scale. One of the characters in his novel
Paris,
an
abbé
named Pierre Froment, describes it as “a citadel of the absurd that dominates, insults, and threatens Paris.” From our vantage point, however, Sacré-Coeur looked neither absurd nor threatening. “This is the moment of magic,” I said. “The street belongs to me.”

“To us,” said Michel, smiling.

“Didn’t Henry Miller turn Sacré-Coeur into a sex object?” I asked. Neither of us knew exactly what the American novelist had written about the basilica when he lived in Paris. I looked it up later and sent the passage from Miller’s 1936 memoir-novel
Black Spring
to Michel: “And then suddenly, presto! all is changed. Suddenly the street opens wide its jaws and there, like a still white dream, like a dream embedded in stone, the Sacré-Coeur rises up. A late afternoon and the heavy whiteness of it is stifling. A heavy, somnolent whiteness, like the belly of a jaded woman.”

We continued our journey. Most of the rue des Martyrs is treeless. It seems that tree roots interfere with the dense underground network of pipes and electrical cables, although at two short stretches, the sidewalks widen to allow space for a few small plane trees. There aren’t many leaves to clean up in fall—but not many birds either, except pigeons.

UNTIL THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY,
when side streets cut asphalt gashes through what had once been vast gardens, the rue des Martyrs had the feel of the countryside. Today, casual observers would never know that some of the front doors along the street—most open only with a digital code—hide exquisite private gardens. Looking through an iron gate at Nos. 41–47, we could see part of a courtyard and a big central garden framed by elegant apartment buildings.

Higher up the street is the gated Cité Malesherbes, one of the most charming private streets in Paris. It begins at the rue des Martyrs, then angles left and exits on the rue Victor-Massé. One building was once a maternity hospital and, before abortion became legal in France, in 1975, a place where women could safely and secretly terminate their pregnancies. Another building houses the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, named after the founder of modern French socialism. The Cité’s wrought-iron
grille
is not locked during the day, but a caretaker sits as a watchdog to keep away the riffraff.

I kept moving north, but at the street’s juncture with two major boulevards, Rochechouart and Clichy, Michel stopped. He seemed surprised that I wanted to go to Montmartre.

“I rarely venture there,” he said. “I don’t know it well.”

“Well, I know a few things about it—so let’s go!” I said.

Like many people in the neighborhood, Michel thinks of the rue des Martyrs as two streets—one in the Ninth, where he and I live, and the other uphill and to the north, in the “village” of Montmartre, in the Eighteenth. The two areas were divided by history. In the 1780s, Louis XVI ordered the wall of the
fermiers-généraux
(farmers-general) to be built around the Paris city lim
its, not as a defensive fortification but as a revenue raiser for the state. The farmers-general had nothing to do with agriculture; they were a group of financiers appointed by the king to collect taxes and customs duties on all goods entering the city, including salt, food, wine, cider, tobacco, coal, firewood, and building materials. A series of large tollhouses were built, including one at the point where the rue des Martyrs hit the city limits.

Montmartre functioned as an independent commune until 1860, when the wall came down and Paris grew. It expanded from thirteen to thirty square miles, from twelve to twenty arrondissements, and from 1.1 million to 1.7 million inhabitants. Montmartre was among the towns and villages swallowed up by the city. For eight more years, the chaussée des Martyrs, the physical extension of the rue des Martyrs in the newly created Eighteenth Arrondissement, kept its identity. Then “
chaussée
” became “
rue
” and the two parts of the street became one, if in name only.

These days, the two parts are divided by a noisy four-lane thoroughfare with parking lanes and a median strip (where the wall once stood) wide enough for trees, park benches, bicycle lanes, and public toilets. Depending on traffic and traffic lights, it can take a minute or two to cross this physical, geographical, administrative, psychological, and auditory barrier.

The name of the broad thoroughfare itself changes where it crosses the rue des Martyrs. The boulevard de Rochechouart, to the right, is lined with cheap tourist shops. The boulevard de Clichy, to the left, bears witness to the seedy remnants of Pigalle, with its peep shows and sex shops. The Moulin Rouge (it really does look like a
moulin rouge,
or red windmill) still attracts busloads of tourists—many of whom come not for dinner and a floor
show but only to take photos. “The sex shops and nightclubs on the boulevard create a barrier,” Christophe Thibaudeau, the manager of the Daniel Féau real estate agency, once told me. “My clients ask for one or the other part of the rue des Martyrs—but never both.”

When my neighbor Thierry Cazaux wrote a book on the street, he ended it at the border with the Eighteenth. For him, that’s a world away. “It’s the other side of the boulevards,” he said, as if that explained everything. “The wall hasn’t been there for a hundred and fifty years, but there are still two streets—one in Paris, the other not.”

People on the other side feel the same way. When I asked Raymond Lansoy, the editor of a small monthly magazine on Montmartre, whether a legendary restaurant had been on the Ninth or Eighteenth side of the rue des Martyrs, he feigned annoyance: “You are sweet, Elaine, but from time to time you get on my nerves! You are not in the Eighteenth, you are in Montmartre.”

He said some residents of Montmartre rarely go south of the boulevard, and when they do, they say, “I’m going down to Paris.”

Even my husband jokes that I am stretching things in making the street one. “By now you must know that no one but you considers it one street,” he said as we dodged traffic and bicyclists to cross the boulevard one Sunday.

Having persuaded Michel Güet to go into Montmartre, I pointed out La Fourmi, a café-bistro on the northeast corner. I like it because you can sit on stools at the zinc bar and thereby pay lower prices than if you sit at a table. We then walked on the stretch of street with the transvestite cabaret, the music hall for rent, and the bar whose goal is never to close.

At the corner of the rue des Abbesses, on our left, we could
see the edge of the place des Abbesses, made famous in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 French cult film
Amélie
. The Abbesses microneighborhood has attracted cool chain stores with overpriced clothing; cool bistros that offer hot dogs, bagels, and brunch; and cool couples crowding the narrow sidewalks with cool babies in cool strollers. Abbesses has become one of Paris’s tourist destinations. It could be in prettified Brooklyn, which makes the contrast with the authentic, unrenovated upper rue des Martyrs more dramatic.

“This is not my world,” said Michel.

The rue des Martyrs dead-ends at a juncture with the rue La Vieuville and an art gallery that has kept the sign of an older shop: “
Papiers Peints
”
—
wallpaper. If we had jogged to the right here, we could have joined waves of tourists and continued north up steep stretches and staircases to Sacré-Coeur. Instead, we turned back.

On our way down, we stopped at an upscale private retirement home that gives this part of the street an air of respectability. “I’ve heard it has a beautiful garden,” I said to Michel. “I wrote a letter asking for permission to see it and never got an answer. Let’s go in and see what happens.”

We entered a quiet lobby and approached the receptionist, a serious-looking woman of about forty. She was polite and firm: this was private property and she could not allow us into the garden.

Michel and I went into seduction mode. I introduced myself by name and said I was a longtime American resident of Paris researching the rue des Martyrs. Michel explained that he had spent his entire life in the neighborhood. When the receptionist heard that my first name was Elaine, she said she was called Elena
Da Cunha. Soon, she and I were discussing her Portuguese roots, my Sicilian ones, the salted dried cod of our childhoods, and how destiny had brought us together. Elena led us into the garden, a deep oval expanse lined with white lilac trees and planted with tulips and daffodils. Michel and I sat on one of the benches listening to the quiet, pleased with our victory.

SINCE THEN, I HAVE LEARNED
that for those who can get beyond the walls and gates, there is more, much more, to discover about the look of the rue des Martyrs than what can be seen from the sidewalk. My key to a tour of the Cité Malesherbes was Thierry Cazaux, the cultured Ninth Arrondissement insider who had contributed information about my building to Didier Chagnas’s group tour. Thierry grew up at No. 8 Cité Malesherbes and still lives there with his ailing father. He has even written a short book about it (and another about the rue des Martyrs). I wrote him several times asking to visit, and he always put me off with an exquisite excuse. Then, for once, I must have said the right thing. He gave me a tour of the Cité Malesherbes.

Inside the gate, the small street is lined with townhouses, most of them private residences with landmark status. No. 9 was built with artists in mind, with a two-story, 150-square-foot atelier; Théodore Rousseau, the champion of the Barbizon school, had painted at this address. No. 12 has a neoclassical look, with sculpted stone masks and long garlands of fruits and flowers on the facade, wrought-iron balconies, and a garden of more than three hundred square feet. No. 20 shows off an Art Nouveau spiral staircase enclosed in glass, making it visible from the outside.

The facade of No. 11 is adorned in riotous color: its ceramic plaques and enameled lava stone have been painted with miniature reproductions of the art of Paris’s Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Church.

No. 8, Thierry’s house, was built in the 1860s. Its parlor could be a museum, or at least the set for a film about the late-nineteenth-century Parisian bourgeoisie. (I call it a parlor and not a living room because it doesn’t look livable.) The decor dates from a century ago, or so it seems: oil paintings covering the walls, almost up to the ceiling; a pastel-colored rug with a floral pattern laid over worn gray wall-to-wall carpeting; uncomfortable, horsehair-filled chairs. We sat there in semidarkness, without artificial light, until Thierry said he had something else to show me. He led me through the dining room and out a back door into a large garden with a round table and chairs at its center. It was here, he said, that he did his best work.

I discovered another special house while food shopping one Sunday morning. Pauline Véron, then deputy mayor of the Ninth Arrondissement, was campaigning to become mayor: shaking hands, kissing babies, listening to complaints. She introduced me to a woman in her eighties with impeccable makeup and blond hair pulled into a poufy bun. The woman’s clothes showed her curves to their best advantage; “dolled up” would be the old-fashioned way to describe her. She was talking nonstop.

“She is the best expert you could ever find on the rue des Martyrs,” Pauline said when she brought us together. “Her house is a hidden jewel. Maybe she will invite you over one day.”

That day was today. “Follow me!” the woman commanded, so I began trailing someone whom I had just met and whose name I didn’t know.

We stopped at No. 46, the entrance next to Rose Bakery, a British-style bakery, café, and food shop specializing in organic vegetable tarts, scones, and carrot cake. When the place opened, in 2002, it became the best-known destination on the street. It made South African–born Rose Carrarini world-famous: she wrote cookbooks and opened branches in Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, London, and Seoul.

The woman punched in her digital code to unlock the outer door. We walked through a narrow entrance into a courtyard and garden. A staircase at the back ended at another door, which she opened to reveal an unexpected space: a second, secret garden landscaped with trees and rosebushes. A small, three-story building stood at the end of a path to the left. It had been built 150 years earlier as an artist’s studio; the woman and her husband bought it a century later, tripled it in size, and made it home.