The Latin Quarter on Saturday Night

1

PERIODICALLY, every twenty or thirty years in the course of the past eight centuries, some contemporary French poet has apologized for the decline of the Latin Quarter. But through all its historical upheavals and the smooth passage of the centuries, the Latin Quarter, in the words of one of its best chroniclers, Jean Emile-Bayard, “changes its place and form, but endures.” Its Modernism, like Hercules, finds that its Past, in the manner of the giant Antaeus, is renewed by contact and derives fresh strength each time it is thrown to earth.

Today, in the Latin Quarter, are new faces and voices, young men and others not so young, survivors of a war that made anything in other eras look like child’s play. They are uncertain of their talents, of the validity of our age.

The students of the Left Bank still look outlandish and frivolous; a phenomenal amount of hard study and fine instruction takes place; cults spring up like mushrooms; there are fist fights and reconciliations, drinking bouts and mornings after. Today those young men with whiskers and the lassies with the indelicate air, for a tuition amounting to 250 francs a term, less than 70 cents, enjoy the facilities of the great university, the Sorbonne. Those in the law school are guided by Professor Julliot de la Morandiére, an eminent jurist and pedagogue; de Broglio is dean of mathematics, Laporte of philosophy, and Professor Mirkine Guegevitch heads the college of political science. Of a total of nearly 49,000, 2000 of the regular students are Americans who, like the French, are admitted if they have passed the equivalent of a Baccalaureate and are qualified to enter an American university. The administrator of the Sorbonne, Jean Sarrailh, was appointed in 1946 and works in harmony with Pierre DcGaulle, who is president of the Paris Municipal Council. Much of the musty atmosphere between the wars has cleared. Today’s Latin Quarter, to those who look beyond the surface, reflects in microcosm the problems, hopes, fears, and prospects of France and the Western world.

Where is the Latin Quarter? What are its boundaries?

Each man who writes about it expresses a slightly different opinion, according to his experience and period. The purist goes back to the days when the Romans, after the conquest of Gaul, lived on the slope of what is now called Mont Ste-Geneviève, among the vineyards. They built elaborate baths in what is now the Boulevard St-Michel, and an amphitheater in the rue Monge. Before World War I, archaeologists rummaging in the foundations of the Lycee St-Louis found the relics of a public meeting hall there.

Since no one can fix with authority any physical boundaries, it is better to say that the Latin Quarter is where the students choose to congregate in numbers. Today, to use botanical terms, the ovule of the Quarter is the Cafée de Flore, and the receptacle the Place St-Germain-des-Prés. The roots, stalk, and long leaves of the plant are where they have been since the Sorbonne was founded in the thirteenth century, marked by the Panthéon, which stands on the most imposing site of any building in Paris.

In Whistler’s day, van Gogh’s, Yvette Guilbert’s, Georges Courteline’s, the students and their girls used to meet every Thursday night at the Bat Bullier, near the Closerie-des-Lilas, on Montparnasse. There they danced the fast waltz and the java, the galop and the schottische Each Friday afternoon, the students, intellectuals, and habitués took a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens and gathered around the fountain of the Medici to greet acquaintances, compare notes, and make appointments.

In 1950, the big night is Saturday, and where will the students be found? On the terrasse of the Flore, the Deux-Magots, the Brasserie Lipp, and the lloyale, and in cellar, courtyard, and narrow sidewalk hot spots which show an American influence in drinks, styles of dancing, and jazz: the Club StGermain-des-Prés, Tabu, the Vieux-Colombier, underneath the famous theater which still maintains or surpasses old standards. Last summer the VieuxColombier’s Othello and La Tour Eiffel Qui Tue, with Michel de Re and Janine Grenet, played to “Standing Room Only” audiences when theaters on the Right Bank were not as well patronized. The list of “clubs,” bars, and joints (in French, boîtes) where students and tourists mingle includes Chez Inez, La Heine Blanche, the Nest of Vipers near StSéverin, the Montana Bar not far from the Left Bank branch of the American Library, and the Civet.

On the sidewalks and in back rooms of the more decorous cafés is the kind of talk associated in the literary mind with the traditional Quartier Latin — art, belles-lettres, philosophy. If the art is the latest Picasso, the poetry that of the revolutionists of the Word, and the philosophy tinged with JeanPaul Sartre, that does not mean that it is less earnest, violent, or fruitful than the talk of yesteryear. And if the students, who welcomed Oriental and North African influences before World War II, today are all out for the offerings of the United States, is that necessarily a step backward or toward madness?

The older writers, long established and identified with respectable and lofty ideals — for instance, members of the group including Claudel, Mauriac, de Montherlant, and Jules Remains and called, not too reverently sometimes, “the last pillars of the Church ” — could walk up and down the Boulevards St-Germain and St-Michel without, being recognized or saluted by large numbers of the younger generation. But let Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, or Louis Armstrong step from a taxicab and the American jazz exponent would be greeted from all sides with zest and appreciation. Few are the whiskered denizens of the Quarter who would not know that Bechet is the old master of the clarinet who plays the richest “Dixieland” and that Charlie Parker is runner-up to Dizzy Gillespie in the be-bop stratosphere. And Satchmo’ with his wellspring of invention and contagious wide smile! He could, in the words of the popular song, have the clappers of the bells of Notre-Dame or the keys to the Hotel de Ville if they were the sole property of the post-war crop of young Parisians.

In dim corners around the Panthéon, the old Noctambules, the Taverne, chez Dupont, there might be a few mixed couples doing the java or the “fox.” Where Claude Luter, Django Rhinehart, and Braslavsky were playing, below street level in the rue St-Benoit, the rue du Dragon or the rue des Pretres-St-Sévcrin, couples would be doing the Lindy Hop, the Suzy-Q, and all the Harlem varieties of rug cutting conceivable. If the first American cocktails were served in the “American” bar of the Taverne du Pantheon in the early 1900s, Martinis, Manhattans, Daiquiris, Bacardis, and Jack Roses go over the tiny zinc bars and the wide mahogany bars of St-Germain in profusion. The students can seldom afford luxury drinks, unless the tourists are buying. But some of the soundest beer in the world is on tap at Lipp’s near-by, the Hatt de Cronenbourg from Alsace, at 10 cents (35 francs) the seidel.

Those who have formed their idea of Latin Quarter existence from the opera La Bohème or the film in which Mr. Paul Muni played Zola will get a rude shock when they see the 1950 Quarter on a Saturday night. It will do them a world of good. The French have never been afraid of influence, and, like the Chinese, transform what is foreign into something native with little delay.

And what kind of grisette will the tourist today see in place of pale Mimi, of the buxom long-skirted types depicted by Hopkinson Smith while America had its Gibson girl, of the Jeanne Duvals beloved of Baudelaire, of the Sarah Brownes who stripped at the art students’ ball in 1893? The female denizen of the Quarter, vintage 1950, is slender, supple, and strong. The calves of her legs, if not the spread of her hips, indicate that for years she has gone from place to place on bicycles. Her hair is long, and straight if it is not naturally curly, her lipstick is vivid, her cheeks relatively pale. She is not consumptive, like Mimi. She wears her broad belt high. Her shoes have built-up spongy soles and are more or less flat. No hat, no gloves, no clue, except a forceful style of her own. She does as she likes, and is not pushed around. When she takes a fancy to a poor young man, or a middle-aged one for that matter, it is not the modern Mimi who will be timid or afraid. It will be Rudolph, if anyone, who trembles. They will saunter down the street, hand in hand. They are companions. If quite a few of the young men are American GI’s, let it pass. Let be.

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THE pilgrim to the Latin Quarter today will find in each small crooked street or broad thoroughfare something old as well as something new. Antaeus and Hercules, Past and Present, are both still in the ring.

It must be a source of satisfaction to the proprietors of the Cafe Voltaire, for instance, to feel that when they take a visitor upstairs to read the signatures and inscriptions of Anatolc France, Paul Bourgel, Richepin, Coppee, and Mallarme in the Golden Book, they are serving food downstairs just as good and wines as sound as were relished by the celebrities now defunct; also that the present company is not always dull or uninspired. Across from the Odéon, now called the Salle Luxembourg of the Coinédic-Françaiso, ihe Voltaire is quite as attractive and vital as it ever was. On the other hand, the once famous Procope, former refuge of Huysmans and Voltaire, with oil paintings of Rousseau and Mirabeau on its walls, has sunk to the level of an ordinary bistro. Ihe Café Rouge, worse luck, has been converted into a cheap photographer’s studio.

The “painting factory” in which Watteau and other distinguished painters — classic, romantic, and modern — worked for coins with which to “boil the pot” is still in operation, just off the rue Cujas. The belt-line artists are stationed along a bench, side by side, some with easels, others preferring to work “flat.” The man farthest left is a specialist in underpainting and with a large-sized brush covers the canvas with neutral shades, light above the horizon. Next to him, a sky painter does a creditable sky. Then a foreground man takes the canvas and fills the front plane with grass, rocks, water, or sand. One who is adept at trees puts in a few of those, and a figure man adds a human or two, or some domestic animals. The whole thing is finished in less than an hour, and sells for a fair price before it is dry, sometimes. In Watteau’s day religious paintings found the readiest market. His specially was the head of St. Sebastian. While blindfolded or in darkness, Watteau could paint the saint as far down as the shoulders, and often performed this feat to demonstrate his skill or win a bet.

A piquant holdover from the early eighteenth century is the laundry for men and boys with only one shirt, in the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The client is made comfortable on a hard wooden bench, and foreigners of all kinds are welcome. Those who are waiting for their shirts to be washed, dried, sprinkled, ironed, and returned sit naked to the waist and converse on cultural or political subjects, or just tell risqué stories. The fee is small, today only 20 francs, a little less than the eighteenth part of a Yankee dollar. I found few places where the laundry work was better.

After mentioning with such enthusiasm the Luxembourg Gardens, it would be a pity not to tell about the little popular dance hall where nursemaids entrusted with children whose parents intended that the kiddies spend the afternoon in the open air, among the trees and bees, may check them for a nominal fee and spend the hours with their boy friends on the dance floor. Here the dancing is strictly old-fashioned.

The children are all herded together in an enormous back room, and learn, if nothing else, that it takes all kinds to make a world. Perhaps that makes up to them in a measure the lack of outdoor play and air. The checking fee per child per hour is 5 francs, less than the price of a daily newspaper.

Although the Café Balzar in the rue des Éeoles was never a rendezvous for students, being too expensive and not overcrowded with rich tourists, it was and is one of the best points of vantage from which to see the Latin Quarter life of pre-war and post-war style intermingled. The Sorbonne stands just to the right, the Noctambules is a few steps to the left, and across the way is the tiny Place Paul Painlevé, with its cluster of trees, including a majestic linden. The Balzar was the first place in Paris where first-class beer was served, and its beer today cannot be surpassed, and is equaled only at Lipp’s, which is under the same management. Now that their colleagues who were Collaborators have been cleaned out, the French journalists and columnists are coming back to the Balzar, arriving about midnight, and it soon will reach its pre-war standard — in fact, as soon as cream is plentiful and legal for its inimitable white sauces and rich desserts.

Should it depress a young student today when he reminds himself that Erasmus once attended the Sorbonne, and the modern young man does not feel like another Erasmus? Let him think, instead, of Berlioz, who could not make the grade as a medical student and leaped from a window to escape his first session in the dissecting room.

Shall the youth of France today weep because their country is bankrupt? It is no worse off financially than it has been since 1914, and a lot of living has gone on between 1914 and 1950, much of it bitter, some sweet. Is the Latin Quarter’s young novice to bow down in discouragement because he finds the government inept, in fact sometimes ridiculous? The government of France has practically always been inefficient, and nearly always comical.

The Latin Quarter goes on, with its profound traditions behind it, the problems of today in its lap, a future in the dreams of those who, waking, will forge it.