Studio: international art (35.1905)

Montmartre

THE END OF THE
RUE DES SAULES

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY CLIVE HOLLAND

less frequented corners, and plane trees and
trellised vines for shade.

Here, during the summer months, pilgrims fore-
gather after their wearisome climb from the Place
St. Pierre by way of the steep Rue Foyatier or the
flights of innumerable stone steps. Here we have
seen white-coiffed sisters, priests, and peasants, from
Normandy, Picardy, the departments of the Loire,
from Auvergne and Provence, Alsace-Lorraine
and far-off Brittany, and even from the land that
lies under the shadow of the Pyrenees. To this
little pied-a-terre, with its babel of patois, its breath
of country life brought hither by sun-tanned men
and rosy-cheeked women, many an artist still
comes for inspiration, taking rough pilgrimage fare
at the long wooden tables whilst rapidly jotting
down in his sketch-book types to be found nowhere
else within the wide span of the engirdled city

spread out on all sides below
the famous hill.

Let us go along the Rue de
la Barre (the ancient Rue des
Rosiers), once a tree-shaded
walk with market gardens and
even a dairy or two, to the great
Basilica; now a stridently white
pile in the July sun, but at dawn
or sunset often beautified beyond
description by lingering shadows,
cast by pinnacle and buttress, and
rose-hued light. In this Rue de
la Barre are now, alas ! only tiny
shops, in the windows of which
are garish pictures, images of St.
Pierre, the Virgin and Child,
crucifixes, and candles ; whilst at
their doors stand not the pictur-
esque dairymaid, or the true types
of Montmartre, but the smart
“shop girls ” from the main
boulevards, who introduce a
false, modern note amid much
that is still archaic. It is the
atmosphere of a bazaar and bar-
gaining brought within the
shadow of the great white pro-
pitiatory temple.

From the wide platform in
iront of the Basilica Paris lies
outstretched; the quaint, irreg-
ularly built streets of Montmartre
leading the eyes out across the
miles of roofs, whose crudities
are often softened by a slight
haze, to the melting hills to the south and west.

Far away across the river, only tiny patches of
which can be distinguished half hidden between
the houses, gleams the gilded dome of the

Invalides, like a gemmed boss set in a shield of
duil, hammered metal.

Although, nowadays, it is not inaptly said that
the Butte, with its old cemetery, tree-shadowed and
beautiful, contains more noted dead than living,
in the streets which climb up tortuously towards it
dwell many famous in the art, letters, and music of
present day Paris, or in that of the immediate past.
Cormon, the painter of great canvases of historical
subjects, has his studio in the Rue d’Aumale.
Benjamin Constant, famous painter of classical
Eastern subjects, had his in the Rue Pigalle.
Whilst Gerome, painter of odalisques, lions and
tigers, and lover of polychromatic statues; and

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