Montmartre

“The day of the first performance of Apollinaire’s Couleur du Temps at the Conservatoire Renée Maubel, while I was talking to Picasso in the balcony during the intermission, a young man approaches me, stammers a few words, and finally manages to explain that he had mistaken me for one of his friends supposedly killed in the war…A few days later, through a mutual friend, I begin corresponding with Paul Eluard, whom I did not know by sight.  On furlough, he comes to see me:  I am in the presence of the same person as at Couleur du Temps.”

“I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value…which, by their absolutely unexpected, violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke—a way of transforming gossamer into spiderweb” ~ Breton, Nadja

I stopped at a mart to pick up an Orangina and headed across the bridge that transverses the cemetery towards Montmartre itself.  Asphalt soon gave way to cobblestone streets that wind up and around.  Ivy vegetated on the walls.

I saw a balcony with two cranes on either side, one with beak pointed upwards and the other with a neck bent backwards, pruning its body, both sculpted from a darkish metal. 

A plaque on the side stated that an Adolf Loos had built the apartment for the Romanian born writer Tristan Tzara, famous for being one of the founders of the Dada movement in Zurich and, after his move to Paris, an important member of the Surrealists.

I stopped at a corner café for a croissant and coffee, right across from a store selling Toulouse Lautrec prints of various sizes.  The croissant was stale, or at the very least, old.  I continued on past the Conservatoire Renée Maubel, and rounding a corner, I entered a square. Violinists and accordionists played with cases open next to caricaturists and live portrait painters, landscape painters, and mimes.  The perimeter of the square was one big terrace. 

After I exited the square, I came to a fork in the road, with a large pink building on the corner, La maison rose.  I walked by it at first, not seeing any room on the terrace, but when I ended up looping back around, I stopped and ending up sitting inside and having a cup of French onion soup at 4 in the afternoon.

As I was walking back through the square, I saw an older man selling prints which I immediately recognized.  I had been given the very same black and white print over a year ago in an apartment in Bloomington, Indiana, after a friend had visited Paris.  It shows a caricature of a bearded man with glasses and a largish nose, and the nose and the man’s hair contain the image of a naked woman reclining, her curves are his profile, her bush, his eyebrows.  The text “What’s really on a man’s mind” appears alongside a stylized Sigmund Freud signature. 

As I turned a corner, I heard a man playing “Hey Jude,” and I made my way down a staircase.  The birds were chirping, and I came out onto a lookout, the Eiffel Tower in the distance.  

Humming nah nah nah nananaha nananaha to myself, I spotted a mustache that could mean only one thing.  Dalí.  There was an exhibit at L’Espace Montmartre about Dalí and his influence on contemporary artists, composed of some of Dalí’s lesser known works, like his predictably hallucinatory watercolor illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, and the crustaceous come on, Le Téléphone aphrodisiaque.

On my way out of the exhibit, I bought a print of Dalí’s "Banlieu de la ville paranoia aprés-midi,” passing up plenty of melting clocks.  

As I walked out, I heard the bells of Le Sacre Coeur tolling the hour, and rounding the corner, I took in the cathedral, and the French servicemen holding automatic rifles by the doors, the first but certainly not the last time I'd seen heavily armed soldiers in Europe.  There was also a man doing football tricks at the top of the stairs.   

The view of the city from the stairs of the cathedral was panoramic, people watching the afternoon sun sink down in the west, a slight haze on the horizon. 

I headed down the stairs, down into the city, towards the Seine.