Paris - Montmartre - 18e

Plate LXXXIX – Montmartre …

To the north of Paris is a hill known as the Butte Montmartre. Some 130 metres above the city and crested by the brilliantly off white basilica of Sacré Coeur it beckons the city’s visitors to come and explore the myriad winding streets and alleys that make up the district to which it lends its name. The name itself derives from a translation of ‘the mountain of the martyr’, referring to St. Denis, former bishop and patron saint of the city, decapitated here in around 250 AD. Originally outside the city limits, it owes its early public popularity to its former tax free status - and reputedly also to the wine made by the local nuns. (It remains a popular drinking area to this day, and having personally enjoyed a robust burgundy or two in it’s precincts I can highly recommend it). Long known also as a place of worship, the church of St Pierre (now dwarfed by the new basilica) is reputedly the oldest of God’s houses in the city. I had, on the day of my visit, been told of the sudden death of a dear friend back home, and it was in the silent still darkness of St Pierre’s that I lit my first ever votive candle. Despite being neither Catholic nor deeply religious it seemed the proper thing to do, and it somehow did make me feel spiritually closer to a bereaved distant family. St. Pierre’s is reputedly where the Jesuit order was founded.

Best known as the home of artists and musicians, Montmartre was inhabited by this community from the early nineteenth century right through to the middle of the twentieth. Famous names associated with the area, too exhaustive to list completely, include Baker, Brissaud, Bruant, Degas, Derain, Matisse, Modigliani, Piaf, Picasso, Pissaro, Renoir, Satie, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh and Utrillo. Many mourn the passing of those bohemian years, so poignantly expressed in Charles Aznavour’s lyrics to La Bohème, but the often gritty reality of life in Montmartre was so brilliantly captured in the film La Môme, with Marion Cotillard in her Oscar winning portrayal of Edith Piaf. A more sanitised depiction of the area was seen in the movie Amélie.  Now designated an historical district, building development is restricted, and the character of the streets will be well preserved. Still populated by a diverse range of individuals including restaurateurs, accordionists, pick-pockets, painters, sketchers, silhouette artists, con artists and hookers, and with a vast number of restaurants and cabarets including the Moulins – Rouge, and de la Galette - and the Lapin Agile, a stroll along the steep sloping alleys cannot fail to bring back some feeling of the decadence of a past life in the city’s north.