THE REAL MONTMARTRE
Cabaret du Lapin Agile Quartier Latin who do not starve, commit suicide, return to their parents to eat the fatted calf, become rich and famous or alcoholic and insane, have one other resource left them,—a resource beside which the proverbial jump out of the frying-pan into the fire is the quintessence of discretion,—namely, emigration to Montmartre.
Originally given over to windmills and plaster ovens, a suburb at the time of the Great Revolution (when it went for a while by the name of Mont-Marat), Montmartre did not become a part of Paris proper until 1859.
“I knew Montmartre,” says one of its ardent admirers, “thirty-five years ago. It was a quarter like another, less alive, in fact, than most others, except in the immediate vicinity of the balls, le Grand Turc, la Boule Noire, etc.
“All of a sudden the Haussmannising empire bound it to Paris by the Boulevard Magenta, and the picks of the workmen have had no respite since.”
The Eighteenth Arrondissement, which corresponds roughly with Montmartre, has nearly doubled in population since the Franco-Prussian war, and is now a city of more than 225,000 souls.
“Travellers tell us,” wrote Aurélien Scholl in 1898, “that in America cities spring up with incredible rapidity.... I know only two localities in France which have undergone a similar speedy transformation,—Royan[95] and Montmartre. It is not so very long ago that we saw from the boulevards looking up the rue Laffitte a verdant butte with a few windmills whose arms enlivened the perspective. There were hovels and tiny, shabby-looking shops along the present boulevards (Clichy and Rochechouart).
“Montmartre is to-day one of the finest cities of France. It has three theatres, five or six cafés-concerts, a circus, restaurants, and brasseries.... La cigale sings there all summer—and all winter.”
In the partial eyes of the loyal Montmartrois, Montmartre, “Ville Libre,” literary and artistic Bohemia par excellence, is as much the capital of Paris[96] as Paris is the capital of France. To them all the rest of Paris, the Latin Quarter included, is merely Montmartre’s back yard.
Montmartre, by reason of its surpassing view, has always been favoured as a place of residence by detached writers and artists; and, after the closing of the Théâtre Bobino in the Quartier Latin, a perceptible literary and artistic current thitherward set in. But it was the exodus of the “Hydropathes” and “Hirsutes” of the Quartier to the Chat Noir that marked (marked rather than caused) the real beginning of Montmartre’s supremacy.
The Cercle des Hydropathes[97] owed its origin to one Charles Cros, who, tiring of being relegated to an inglorious obscurity while Coquelin Cadet won laurels by the recitation of monologues, which he (Cros) had written, decided to recite his monologues himself.