Paris - Boulevard Clichy - 18e

Plate LXXXVI - Boulevard de Clichy …

If you’re not here on ‘business’, the safest way for the curious, pedestrian tourist to walk along Boulevard de Clichy is to take the middle island in preference to the side pavements. Of course if you are there on business, and knowing the emporia of the area include such names as Love Theatre, Pigalle’s Peep Show or simply Sex Shop, you probably won’t want to do this. This is the red-light district of Paris so you then also won’t mind the continuous approaches of the pimps or mecs who ply their trade along the Boulevard - seemingly for twenty four hours a day. It started off as entertaining, but the persistence of some can start to seem annoying and then even threatening; but it does seem an unwritten code that they, with their promises of showing you a very good time, do not bother strollers taking that sacred middle ground. Of course this choice of path precludes any ‘window shopping’, and the often fading pictures of some of the performances on offer promise delivery of exactly what you’d go shopping for along certain stretches of the Boulevard. Nudge, nudge – wink, wink!

Such was my introduction to what I venture is the essential Paris - Pigalle and Montmartre. If anyone with only an hour in the city asked me where they simply had to go, this would be it. Forget the Louvre (it needs days) or the Eiffel Tower (you’ll see it from here anyway) and you’ll almost certainly pass the Arc de Triomphe en route. Montmartre is the Paris of Piaf, Degas, Lautrec, Renoir, Utrillo, Daumier, van Gogh, and Picasso, the Moulin Rouge, Au Lapin Agile and many cabarets, the Sacré Coeur and the Place du Tertre.

And of sex.