Around and About Paris,
by Thirza Vallois

A Glimpse at the 6th Arrondissement

In fine weather, the terrace of the Deux Magots, at the foot of the medieval church tower of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, overflows with a medley of locals and tourists from the four corners of the earth. They have gathered here to raise ghosts from a past blessed with an aura of Left Bank intellectual and artistic nonconformity and of postwar scandalous existentialism. Here the intelligentsia spent their days in heated conversation on bustling café terraces and at night plunged into its basements, to be caught up in frenzied sounds of Dixieland or Bebop.

The rest of Paris showered insults upon these 'rats de cave', ('basement rats')'troglodytes' , ('cave-dwellers')'qui ont du Sartre sur les dents' (a pun on 'tartre'- who have tartar/Sartre on their teeth, that is, who talk of nothing but Sartre). Simone de Beauvoir was derided as La Grande Sartreuse (a pun on 'Chartreuse', a Carthusian nun) or Notre-Dame de Sartre (a pun on 'Chartres'). To her friends she was known fondly as Castor because of her methodical diligence.

Today's visitors to the Deux Magots look vaguely for Jean-Paul Sartre's chair, not knowing that Sartre's hang-out, during the last war, was not the German-infested Deux Magots but the upstairs of the next-door Flore: a heating stove placed in the middle of the room by the café's owner, Monsieur Paul Boubal, proved a blessing, particularly during the harsh winter of 1943/4.

Huddling into these cosy premises, J.P. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and others spent their days at separate little tables, absorbed in their writing, Sartre working on Les Chemins de la liberté, de Beauvoir on Tous les hommes sont mortels. But the spacious, sunny terrace of the Deux Magots on the square is more appealing than the narrow terrace of the Flore, constricted by the traffic-ridden Boulevard Saint-Germain, especially in summer, when it is often livened up by buskers and by the celebrated merry-making band of the Beaux-Arts school. J.P. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir did not, however, stay long at Saint-Germain - by the time passers-by sought them out after the war, they had migrated elsewhere, notably to the bar of the Pont-Royal hotel on rue du Bac (in the 7th arr.).

Although Sartre's 'band' did not frequent the Deux Magots, others did and the presence of Jacques Prévert and his 'band', of Picasso, André Breton, Mouloudji, Roger Blin, to mention but a few, amply justified the establishment's catchphrase: 'le rendezvous de l'élite intellectuelle.' Following Parisian traditions, each coterie took up residence in a given café and, within that café, in a distinctly delineated territory.

During the 1920s, for example, Paul Valéry, André Gide, Joseph Kessel, Léon Blum and Gaston Gallimard frequented the terraceless but highly 'atmospheric' Brasserie Lipp; in the 1930s André Breton and his Surrealist friends preferred the Deux Magots, which, however, fell out of favour during the Occupation because it was popular with the Germans. After the war communists and their sympathizers gathered at the Bonaparte on Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or in Marguerite Duras's flat on rue Saint-Benoît, while musicians showed preference for the Royal Saint-Germain (now replaced by the Drugstore Publicis).

If few connect the Flore with Sartre, fewer still are aware that several decades earlier it had been the sinister haunt of the promoters of political anti-semitism. Here in 1899, when the retrial of Alfred Dreyfus unleashed vehement passions throughout France, the virulent Jew-hater Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet, son of Alphonse, and others founded l'Action Française, a movement and a magazine of unspeakable virulence, which prepared the ground for what was to come four decades later. It is not insignificant that, in 1945, on being sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration and expelled from the Academie Française, Charles Maurras cried out: 'It is the revenge of Dreyfus!'

The American 'expatriates' who joined in during the 1920s, came for fun rather than for ideology. Making good use of the favourable dollar exchange rate and breaking loose from the shackles of prohibition at home, they found Paris a place of plenty and of limitless opportunities.

The newly-wed Hemingways, freshly arrived in Paris in December 1921, could enjoy a hearty meal at the Pré-aux-Clercs, on the corner of rue Jacob and rue Bonaparte, for the puny sum of 6 francs, with wine at 60 centimes extra. And although many Americans had to content themselves with a dingy hotel room with no running water, up a steep staircase, the sense of freedom, away from puritanical America, the colourful streets overflowing with abundant, cheap food, and the sense of comradeship provided by the smoky cafés largely compensated for those shortcomings.

Of course there were also those Americans who were not short of money at all. Natalie Barney's literary salon at 20 rue Jacob, with its charming, shady courtyard overgrown with ivy, was the gathering-place of the beautiful people, where friendship, love, art and literature were celebrated in a mock Greek temple, dubbed Le Temple de l'Amitié, in an atmosphere of genteel refinement -- Miss Barney disliked the crude atmosphere of café terraces, but had to compromise eventually and allow whisky to be served instead of tea.

However, the main occupation of the 'expatriates' was writing, for which encouragement came from two American ladies: Gertrude Stein, who opened her home at 27 rue Fleurus to those in whom she had faith - or who did not threaten her; and Sylvia Beach, who was able to publish and sell their works through her shop, Shakespeare and Company, at 12 rue de l'Odéon. It took a lot of courage on her part to publish James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, but she trusted his genius and was proved right. ...