From Montmartre to Pigalle--what a place to start

Usually, I work on my research and writing in the morning, exercise a bit, and take the afternoon to do my wandering about, but today I worked longer because I had an atrocious cold this weekend and didn't get the work done I wanted to do.  So, I decided to eat early and wander a bit at night.  Where to go?  It was a pleasant evening, and thinking the weather might soon turn damp, I decided to go up to Montmartre and meander down from there.  Montmartre is a very touristy place, both because it offers a great free view of the city, and because there's a huge church up there which looks like it was transplanted from medieval Byzantium.  Sacre Coeur Cathedral (translated as the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart) is made of white limestone which, rather bizarrely, only gets whiter when it rains, and it rains a lot.  So it's pretty white.  I don't like the church much.  It was built by the Third Republic in 1871 after it crushed the Socialist Paris Commune explicitly to ask heavenly forgiveness for that particular sin--the socialism, not the crushing.  Old leftists like me are therefore put off by it.  Right now, for some reason, it makes me think of Sarah Palin. It's also kind of ugly inside, but maybe that's just my bias at work.  I don't go in unless someone who's visiting me drags me in there.  Then I sit and stew.

Anyway, I didn't go up to Montmartre for the church.  I came for the view, which is stunning, even with lots of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts littering the stairs in front of the church.  There were tourists there, of course, a relatively loud group of young Germans on this occasion, but they moved along, and I contemplated the city I adore.  What strikes one from that vantage point is how level the buildings are.  The city passed laws and regulations decades ago controlling the height of its buildings.  Builders cheat now and then, but not by much, and the lack of the sort of canyons that mark many other cities helps give Paris its character, the sense of a city that one can live in and breathe in, even if too often, the air smells of cigarette smoke.

Anyway, I wandered away from the view and toward the supremely touristy Place du Tertre, where blizzards of tourists get their sketches made by "artists" who demand outrageous prices and get them.  It's full of restaurants French people never visit, but if you can manage to look past that--and it's tough--the buildings are still lovely, and you can still get some sense of what the village of Montmartre was once like, the one where real artists used to live, people like Utrillo and Dali, especially if you get out of the Place du Tertre, which I do with dispatch.  Freed from the crowds, I start downhill on a deserted street and find the lovely little Place Goudeau, a verticle little tree-lined park with benches and one of those marvelous little Wallace Fountains in the middle.  These were placed around Paris in the 1870s by an English philanthropist bothered by the fact that poor people had to pay for water.  They're still a great place to get a drink of pure water.  This photo shows the one I saw, though it was made in the daytime.  As I sit on a bench, I observe a young couple on another bench.  Since I'm a flaneur and not a voyeur, I don't watch too closely.  Not that they care.  Couples in Paris never do.  It's a stereotype of the city that it lends itself to lovers.  Sometimes stereotypes are true.  That one certainly is.

I leave the Place, head down one of the pretty stairways for which this district is famed and find myself on the tiny one-lane rue Andre Antoine.  It's very quiet here--the shops are all closed and people seem to have gone to bed early.  I decide to go wherever this little street takes me, and pretty soon I know exactly where it's going.  I've been dropped rather unceremoniously into the middle of the red light district of Pigalle.

Pig Alley as some American servicemen once rather aptly mispronounced it, is one of the oldest red light districts in Europe, and that's saying something.  I try not to come to Pigalle on purpose, especially at night, when it is at its tacky worst, but, here is where my feet have led me.  The neon signs are bright, in lurid reds, purples, and pinks.  "Sex Shop!" and "Sex Toys" and "Live Girls" blare at me as I wander down the street.  There are touts out front of some places trying hard to get my attention.  This is the only place in Paris where I ignore people who want to say hello, and I think about how sad that is.  In the middle of it all, of course, is the famous, or infamous Moulin Rouge, its huge electric windmill circling overhead, a line of people always at the door ready to pay 150 euros per person--that's $210 at present exchange rates--for a third-rate meal with second-rate champagne to watch a fourth-rate girlie show.  The place is always sold out.

In among the sex shops and tacky peep shows are those Turkish kebab places that seem to have sprouted everywhere in Paris like some kind of culinary Canadian thistle.  They're busy too.  I pass a small bar with men talking on telephones and wonder if they're pimps, and it strikes me that there really is no more lonely or desolate place in a city than a crowded red light district.  Every city has one, and this one is more famous than most.  And it's busy, swallowing up yen and euros and rubles and dollars.  I decide I've had enough for the evening.  I didn't come to Paris to get depressed, it's misting a little, and I don't want to get wet, so I pop into the Pigalle metro station, and the city's wondrous subway system--the subject all by itself of a future post--sweeps me back toward my apartment atop the sixth floor on the northeast side of the city.  I'll wander somewhere else tomorrow, but not in Pigalle again...not if I can help it.