Montmartre

Montmartre, from its northern perch, looks down on the rest of Paris, and is easily recognizable for its fantastic basilica, Sacre Coeur. When I visited Paris in High School, Montmartre was my favorite region of the city: despite being crammed with tourists, I found it beautiful, and mysteriously peaceful, in spite of the crowds. Last Monday, another overcast misty day, Prof. Longino led an EDUCO tour to the historic neighborhood.

A tour through Montmartre is necessarily a tour of the artists, actors, and entertainers who lived there; although I've never taken one, I imagine that a tour of Greenwich Village wouldn't be much different. This is where the starving artists lived, because rent was cheap and light was plentiful -- no indoor heating, and little indoor plumbing, but large south-facing windows. Here, for example, one can visit Pablo Picasso's Parisian house, where he painted the famous Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, the first cubist painting, which anyone who has taken a certain modern literature class with Prof. Schwarz should remember fairly well. You can also visit a certain inn, le Lapin Agile, where many of these artists spent their evenings. The name of the inn derives its name from the shop sign depicting a rabbit, painted in 1893 by an artist named Gill: le lapin à Gill ("Gill's Rabbit") quickly morphed into le lapin agile ("The Agile Rabbit"), which I'm certainly was hilariously funny for the regular clientele, who all knew Gill.

Montmartre abounds with this kind of story. There were so many actresses, dancers, and painters who had all left some kind of a legacy or a memory, sometimes with monuments, sometimes without a trace, that only a Parisian could tell you the full story. Montmartre has that kind of liminal atmosphere to it, to the Parisians: it is located on high ground (always a good starter), and was originally a town independent from Paris, dominated by the strong-willed abbesses of its convent. It is the perfect site for French mystery novels. It is also the site for some of the most expensive wine around; we passed the first urban vineyard I have ever seen: every year, the wine is sold at a special auction at the mairie ("mayory," city hall), and the bottles are stamped with collectible labels -- collectible, that is, for the ultra-rich! These same vineyards, located on the south-facing slope, once provided revenues for the convent of nuns.

The only remains of this convent is the Eglise de Saint-Pierre, just ancient enough to contain a few Romanesque elements amidst the Gothic. For those of you interested in such history, it's also where Saint Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier decided to form the Jesuit order.
In addition to the church, there is, of course the wonderful Basilica of Sacre-Coeur, built during the 3rd Republic, as a place for prayer, with an emphasis on love (for God). It is really a beautiful monument; the family that welcomed us for the atelier de cuisine referred to it as "the Mosque," because of its domed towers (in fact, the real Mosque of Paris is fairly well-hidden, not far south from the Pantheon). Flanking the entrance are a pair of monumental bronze equestrian statues, depicting Charlemagne and Joan of Arc.

Sadly, the mist was too thick for a good view of the rest of the city, but Montmartre was worth visiting for its own views, and not just those it provides of the rest of Paris. Furthermore, the weather prompted Prof. Longino to invite us out to cocoa, which I wasn't about to turn down.

~JD

"Moine lui-meme des l'age de sept ans, partageant entierement avec une profonde satisfaction les benefices religieux, culturels et sociaux qui lui offre le monastere, et dont est privee la majeur partie des hommes, Bede ne sait pas et ne peut pas voir que ce sont precisement ces caracteristiques des fondations monastiques qui encouragent ces mecanismes pervers dont il stigmatise les resultats" [A monk himself since the age of seven, sharing fully and with a deep satisfaction the religious, cultural, and social benefits which the monastery offered him, Bede did not know and could not see that it was precisely these characteristics of the foundations of monasticism which encouraged the perverse mechanisms whose results he stigmatized] (Giovanni Miccoli, "Les Moines," in L'homme medieval, 58).