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A
Dog's Life...
In a search for cleaner sidewalks an expat looks at pampered
Parisian pooches
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what's
happening
and what
we think
about it |
understanding those
serious issues |
music, art, food, etc. |
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about Paris Tempo?
Read this message from the Paris
Tempo Team
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Remembering
Hemingway's Town
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There are never any suicides in the quarter
among people one knows. No successful
suicides.
A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.
(They continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome)
A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.
(No one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)
They find a model dead
Alone in bed and very dead.
(It made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)
Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water soapsuds and stomach
pumps rescue the people one knows.
Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the cafe.
Ernest Hemingway, The
Collected Poems of Ernest Hemingway.
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Little is left of the Paris Hemingway knew.
The city and people that provided the inspiration for his work are
gone. True, some of the old cafes still exist, the buildings haven't
been torn down. But the transformation of time has done its trick
and wiped away the last traces of his Moveable Feast.
After settling into the Left Bank life
in 1921, Hemingway stayed on until 1928, absorbing the character
of his working class quartier. Home was a 4th floor apartment at
74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, near the Place de la Contrescarpe. It
was a modest place, with a faucet and the ubiquitous French pissoir
at each landing on the spiral staircase. The other tenants were
simple people, or as he put it, "salt of the earth with a little
dark dirt mixed in."
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Next-door to number 74 was an angular building
which housed a Bal Musette. A ten-cents-a-dance kind of place, it
was frequented by Sailors and workingmen.
Hemingway knew the place well. The slow
shuffling of feet and the sound of the accordion were clearly audible
in his apartment upstairs. He wrote about it in the Toronto Star
Weekly, March 25, 1922, "The people that go to that Bal
Musette do not need to have the artificial stimulant of the jazz
band to force them to dance. They dance for the fun of it."
Characters from The Sun Also Rises
soon began to show up there and so the humble Bal Musette appeared
in that novel celebrating the decadence of ex-patriot existence.
The little dance hall went out of business
in 1975, was turned into a pornographic movie theater, and more
recently into an avant garde theater.
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The cafes fared better. Many of them survived
the years, suffering the changes. Like the quartier itself, these
cafes have evolved from neighborhood hangouts to high-priced tourist
attractions.
Hemingway wrote and re-wrote The Sun Also Rises hunched
over cafe creme on marble-topped tables at the Closerie des Lilas.
Just down the street at Place Contrascarpe the dregs from the rue
Mouffetard would congregate in noisy bistros. The area was crowded
with the smells of dirty sweat, poverty and drunkenness.
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway
explained the lure of the cafe: "...The people that I liked
and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in
them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and
be together. The big cafes were cheap then too, and all had good
beer and the aperitifs cost reasonable prices that were clearly
marked on the saucers that were served with them."
The cafes at the corner of Blvd. Montparnasse
and Blvd. Raspail were the places people went to be "seen"
publicly. Revolutionaries liked the smoky, high-ceilinged, table-crammed
Rotonde. Painters and writers favored the Dome.
The Dome was the heart of the American
Literary Colony. It was where young writers came as soon as they
arrived in Paris. It was where they left word when they were leaving.
It was the place that created and disseminated gossip. It was a
living newspaper for the American expatriate community.
"There were people there who had worked.
There were models who had worked and there were painters who had
worked until the light was gone and there were writers who had finished
a day's work for better or for worse, and there were drinkers and
characters, some of whom I knew and some that were only decoration,"
explained Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.
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