boul' mich'—1929

PAUL MORAND

the quartier latin has altered greatly but, in essence, it is always the same

After eight centuries the Latin Quarter is still the educational centre of Paris. Its importance has not diminished, but it has greatly changed. The mediaeval quarter, the narrow alleys, the gabled houses that survived between the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Seine have almost wholly disappeared since the war. But the Boulevard Saint-Michel and Montparnasse have become definitely allied, and that is a superb combination.

Twenty years ago Montparnasse was a neighbouring but independent section, which came into contact with the Latin Quarter only in the summer at the Closerie des Lilas or the Bal Bullier; the Luxembourg gardens were a no-man's land. The women of Montparnasse wore their hair as short as did the men of the Latin Quarter; their men shaved their heads, like ancient Egyptians or Central Europeans.

The folk of Montparnasse wore homespun, sandals and Rio Jim silk scarves; they drank alcohol and fed themselves on coffee with cream. The Boul' Mich' stuck to beer and sandwiches; there you saw long hair and heard French spoken. In 1929 the two clans have merged; they have exchanged fashions and even women; as little French is spoken now in the Place de la Sorbonne as in the Rotonde.

It is not at all surprising that this hill of Sainte-Genevieve, which dominates Paris and the left bank, should be a strategic point, for it commands the main roads that pass from the south of France to the north. Along this road from Paris to Orleans, which is the Boul' Mich', there passed the former Roman highway; here was a luxurious suburb, with villas, streams, baths that still exist. The legions of Caesar and Charlemagne marched along this road. And it was on this boulevard that, one September evening in 1914, I saw the army that was flung from Paris, to the northeast, marching toward its victorious onslaught upon the Germans at the Marne.

So came the barbarians in the Third Century and the Eighth; chiefly the Normans, coming from Norway, who destroyed everything in their path.

The Latin Quarter did not begin to develop until after the great wall of Philip Augustus came to shelter it in the Twelfth Century. That wall was flanked by square towers, like the Byzantine fortifications one may still see in Constantinople, and stretched from the Place Saint-Michel to the Rue de Buci and to SaintGermain des Pres whence it climbed to the Pantheon. Beyond the walls stretched open country, an ecclesiastical countryside of vineyards, mills, abbeys, and monasteries. Further out were impassable roads, ponds, and the marshes where we now have the Place de la Concorde, Les Invalides, and Grenelle.

This ecclesiastical character is the essence of the Latin Quarter. Latin is the language of God; wine, which the monks introduced into France, is the blood of Christ; to drink and to study were, for Rabelais, one and the same thing. The Quarter retained its original religious character until the French Revolution. Catholic means universal; universe and university are one and the same word. This word appears for the first time in a law of 1215.

The University represented, in that terrible Thirteenth Century, the first spark of real liberty—that is to say that it offered, on condition of playing the game and observing certain formalities, the only freedom: that of thought. In 1259 the University, recognized by the Kings, possessed, as a token of supreme liberty, the right of sanctuary.

And that same universal and international character that is the Latin heritage, was to be found in the very organization of the University. It is well known that on the hill of SainteGenevieve the students of that time were grouped by nations, and the national groups, again, were subdivided according to provinces. The municipal universities they are trying to establish to-day recall the past. In those days students were boarded as well as instructed. There were colleges for the English, the Germans, the Scotch, the students from Picardy and the Limousine. Dante, Grasme, Lulle, Bacon, either studied or taught in the University.

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It was in the Fifteenth Century, when Francis I made the use of French obligatory, to the detriment of Latin, that -decadence set in, since foreign students were coming to Paris in search of a universal science rather than French.

The Latin Quarter of the Middle Ages was dead, and yet it was not until the Revolution of 1789 that it was completely wiped out.

There are today no reminders of the religious era except in the environs of Saint-Sulpice, south of the Luxembourg, quarters dating from Louis XIII and the Sixteenth Century. The complete transformation of the Latin Quarter into a modern district, lay and without individuality, dates from the Second Empire.

Below, behind Saint-Germain des Pres, the Quartier de Buci, former rendez-vous of vagabonds, of prostitutes, of thieves, which even I can remember as such, and the sinister at-

mosphere of which in pre-war days, Carco has so well described, has become a banal, broadened street, utterly without character. I saw them tearing down Thackeray's charming house there, and all that notorious quarter which was wiped out about 1905 by the creation of the Rue Dante.

When I was a student, Grand Dukes came there as sightseers, notably to the Rue Galande, where one may still see Fifteenth Century houses. There, in the Rue de la Parcheminerie were the public letter writers; I knew the last of them. Jean Giraudoux and I pretended that we didn't know how to write and made him write love letters for us, which he drew up conventionally, like the Chinese scribes of the markets, on lace-edged paper.

The Place Maubert, separated from the Halles by the Seine, has still, however, kept its character as a place of night workers. Villon lived there. Toward two o'clock in the morning, even in 1929, suburban trains, laden with vegetables, borrow the tram lines for the night, and market gardeners' carts come to perfume the Parisian air. The students have their headquarters there, in a charming old house in the Rue de la Bûcherie.

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If one really wants to obtain a true impression of the former Latin Quarter, one must go, to-day, behind the College de France, on Mont SainteGeneviève itself.

Chinese, Armenian and Russian restaurants, brothers of those of Greenwich Village, have replaced the mediaeval rotisseries, the taverns in which, in pewter pots, the students drank those tart wines they no longer make in the neighbourhood of Paris, and yet one still breathes there an ancient air of debauchery, of poverty, of mysticism which is essentially that of the Middle Ages.

I lived for ten years in the Latin Quarter. Oh, Trilby! I have spent many nights in its cafes, danced at the Bullier, wasted hours in seeking rare books, slept in its little hotels, even after my student days were done. Thus I lived in the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, of which my father was director, a beautiful Eighteenth Century mansion, opposite the Chinese restaurant in the Rue de VEcole de Médecine. From my windows I could see the Place Danton where the guillotine was tried out for the first time and the black Gothic dining hall of the Cordeliers' convent which became, during the French Revolution, the Club des Cordeliers, where Danton, Marat and Desmoulins spoke, and which is, to-day, the Dupuytren Museum.

At the corner of the Boul' Mich' and the Rue des Ecoles was the Cafe Vachette, where Giraudoux went to listen to Moreas, as Moreas had gone there to visit Verlaine; to-day that cafe, quite naturally, has become a bank. In the Place du Pantheon was the Cafe Voltaire, also beloved of Verlaine, at the absinthe hour, and of Mallarme, Barrès and Oscar Wilde. In the Cafe Procope the wits of the Revolution and of the Eighteenth Century foregathered, Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists.

The romantic epoch introduced the Germanic brasserie, the reign of which is not yet over, into the Latin Quarter: romantic music, hard boiled eggs, beer mugs. The Germany of 1848 left us the Soufflet Tavern near the Pantheon, which was the haunt of the symbolists of the Nineties, Pierre Louÿs, Tinan, Heredia, while the realistic novelists who preceded them, Zola, Daudet, Goncourt, preferred the Cabaret du Coucou.

As for the churches of the Latin Quarter, one must visit them with Huysmans.

They share the narrow, malodorous streets with evil spots which have not been cleaned up since the Middle Ages. Francis Carco, in his recently published recollections, From Montmartre to the Latin Quarter has written pages reminiscent of Balzac about the dingy little bars of the Rue Monsieurle-Prince, the cabarets of the Rue de l'Hirondelle and the picturesque wretchedness of the neighbourhood of the Rue Mazarin.

Ah! yes it is fine to be twenty in a great city like Paris, and, like Rastignac, Balzac's young hero, to hold out one's hand to the city in a gallant gesture, crying: "To us both!"