Places and Persons

...The former Valboistron, we have stated, was nothing more nor less than an austere plain, a sort of savannah, a prairie, the sort of place apt to capture the imagination of a man like the abbot of Saint Germain as fit for solitude and retreat...

...Responding to his enemy, the Emperor Charles V, who had in an ultimatum displayed his innumerable titles-emperor of the Romans, king of Spain, archduke of Austria, etc.-Francis signed himself: Francois, roi de France et comte de Vaugirard...

...As has been suggested, this quarter has always been relatively neglected, and long may it remain so...

...it was the era of Cardinal DuBois and the Mississippi Bubble...

...I prefer the aspect of a factory to that of a cafe in the style of Berlin...

...I, myself, as a boy was brought up in a place called Elizabeth (New Jersey) a close neighbor to the metropolis, and in my youth it was de rigeur to invent witticisms to illustrate the provinciality of Rahway, five miles away...

...Before one stretches a kind of rural lane, apparently unending, between blackened walls over which are thatched roofs and ancient trees...

...Domestic chickens and sardonic geese wander at will in the gutters, undisturbed by anything more alarming than an occasional wagon loaded with hay...

...The abbot of Saint Germain in the thirteenth century was its first and practically its last "discoverer...

...It was in the era of the regency when all Paris, reacting from the discipline exacted by the old Louis XIV who had just died "like a saint and a hero," threw itself into the most violent pleasures, the most equivocal delights...

...What did he seek in such a spot, at such an hour, the sceptical and frivolous ruler of France...

...In 1793 it was called the Commune Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

...To be sure, certain gross industries have invaded it, and erected a sort of false Atlantis in brick and cement which serves to conceal the delicious alleys and backwaters whose general aspect I have attempted to describe...

...Denis on the Grand Boulevard, a triumphal arch raised in honor of the German victories of Louis XIV, and after traversing the Seine by the Pont Neuf it arrived at Vaugirard by the long and noisy Rue des Sevres in the general neighborhood of the present Parisian Greenwich Village, namely Montparnasse, while the carriages were stationed at night in the Rue des Favorites of the same quarter...

...And with all that, something bare, rustic and soothing, the good simplicity of a countryside in proximity to the lordly, sordid and brutally procreating town, the feeling that a poor and meagre nature is better than none at all, that Demeter in rags is preferable to more meretricious divinities...

...The cholera of 1832 at Paris created an enthusiasm for the countryside based upon reasons more practical than those of romance...

...One's head swims with the thought that this is actually a part of the same city which contains, at twenty minutes' distance, the Opera and the Boulevard Haussmann, the too-odorous Levantines and Orientals of the Latin Quarter as "brought up to date" and the expatriates of Montparnesse...

...It took its departure from the Porte St...

...With a sigh he said to himself, "I will build a house of retreat at Valboistron...

...Some time after this was accomplished, the paternal kindness of the prelate to the inhabitants of the village caused them to give it the name of its imposing guest...

...We find it in Malherbe, in La Fontaine...

...So, at least, we are permitted to suppose, was the sentiment of Dom Gerard de Moret, O.S.B., mitred abbot of Saint Germain-des-Pres, when sometime in the autumn of 1258 he took a rural ride through the deserted district...

...It is the old Vaugirard, that of 1830 and before...

...The wine from Vaugirard would make the goats dance," is one of the expressions attributed to the farmers of the former Valboistron, and though at first glance, this looks like a compliment, though it has a jovial, Witches' Sabbath savor to it, it has on reflection anything but a complimentary aspect...

...Before returning to the Vaugirard of the present, there is one more anecdote of its past which is worth recounting...

...The Terror, as everyone knows, showed a special aptitude at once for sacrilegious destruction and for grotesque nomenclature...

...So far this lost corner, perhaps the last of its kind at Paris, has escaped the fate of old Montmartre, bound over hand and foot to bad painters, barmen with ambitions, unsexed bores, and rich tourists...

...Yet with its history of eight centuries or more, it has always remained the symbol of an unsophisticated and real rusticity...

...There have always been, there will always be, localities of that sort, about which is maintained a legend of retrogression, a not unagreeable backwardness...

...Thus the same demolisher of ancient churches, the same professional killer of helpless priests and women, might well have been adorned with the name of Brutus or Mucius Scaevola...

...One infinitely prefers that such a region be exploited by gross industries than by the industrials of art...

...But might it not have appealed to different spirits for very different motives ? There was a tradition in the middle-ages that the evil one loved to haunt remote and savage places, that the prince of the powers of the air delighted to hover over empty plains and cling to abhorred hills...

...Saint-Simon enlightens us...

...If I had the pretension to believe that this little sketch would result in but the addition of one modern studio, one false auberge or one American bar to this unknown and exquisite quarter, I would tear it up forthwith...

...We dislike to intrude one of those memories making for the dishonor of human nature in a study of this sort, but if the reader goes on foot to Vaugirard by the street of the same name (the longest in Paris) he will in a short time pass a sombre seventeenth-century church and establishment...

...It was to satisfy this new need that the omnibus called the "favorite" was created, and the name "favorite" was given to a Vaugirard street which happily still exists and which is, incontestibly, one of the most curious relics of the good old time left in modern Paris...

...It was a tradition...

...Be that as it may, the philosopher of Ermenonville, who professed a taste for country sights and sounds, would have loved the village as it appeared toward the end of the eighteenth century-an isolated and bedraggled little world of its own at the other end of nowhere, with its windmills, its kitchen gardens, its quarries, and rustic taverns from which on Sunday afternoons issued the sound of fiddles and pipes...

...He who was vowed in a measure to the contemplation of the eternal, found himself at the head of a humming segment of time, a vast ecclesiastical and administrative machine, as preoccupied with real estate as with religion...

...It is a little hole of the province, one might almost imagine, the real countryside...

...Francis was nothing if not Parisian...

...He omitted nothing, down to the silliest reading, to convince himself that there was no God, but he believed in Satan to the extent of hoping to see him in person some day...

...No, the Revolution saw nothing incongruous in turning a pretty name like Vaugirard into the Commune Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

...Places and Persons VAUGIRARD By CUTHBERT WRIGHT TOWARD the middle of the twelfth century, there existed, several miles from the Paris of Notre Dame, the Schoolmen and the crusade, a miserable hamlet frequented by a few vineyarders and herdsmen, and called Valboistron, the termination "bois-tron" signifying a stable...

...It is just as well like that...

...They are those of the Carmelites, converted in 1792 into a prison, whose tragic garden, with its leprous walls and blasted trees, saw, on a Sunday in September, old men and youthful seminarians chased from corner to corner by the representatives of democracy armed with spikes and cleavers...

...The French Revolution which scattered the bones of Francis, of Saint Lambert of Vaugirard and so many other relics, sacred and profane, gave the village a new name...

...It did not mean, as in our immediate epoch, the pleasure of imprisoning oneself in some smart and ignoble American speakeasy...

...Bohemia" in Gerard's time meant getting out of the town into the fresh country, with its novelty, its naive satisfactions, its unsophisticated vintages, its curious fairs, its eggs and milk, its pretty girls, its peace which is that of God, For the city man of the eighteenth century and since, "bohemia" meant the momentary adventure of returning to nature...

...The omnibus in question was of a new model, bearing itself high on its wheels but without a platform behind on which one could take the air, and it could hold fourteen people inside...

...Piron, the eighteenth-century humorist who was the delight of Dijon, has, in one of his amusing books, a whole collection of anecdotes at the expense of Dijon's little neighbor, Beaune...

...It was reserved, however, for a French sovereign of the sixteenth century, Francis I, to put the whole rural legend of Vaugirard in eight words...

...One imagines a landscape, half fanciful, half drearily realistic, such as may be found in the painting of Salvator Rosa and other primitive romantics-a dull, green plain broken here and there by tufts of bushes and bits of woodland, a few cattle ruminating under the declining day, a single shepherd with his dog...

...The deplorable demon of the "picturesque" has passed it by...

...Had not its original name been that of a Catholic priest...

...Such desperate amateurs as Jean-Jacques and Gerard de Nerval have ignored it...

...As the prelate on his caparisoned mule returned slowly through the dusk of the lonely fields, his thoughts may have reverted to the great abbey which he ruled, a fortified city in itself, a hive of activity with its men-at-arms, notaries, valets, sacristans, choir boys chattering like sparrows...

...Thus Vaugirard is one of the oldest of the twenty odd villages which in the year 1859 were brusquely incorporated into the monstrous town...

...Thus, at all events, thought the regent himself, Philip of Orleans, whom Saint-Simon shows wandering in cloak and mask late at night about the empty quarries of Vaugirard...

...But the regent confessed to me that he had never seen or heard anything...

...He took counsel of all sorts of fatuous people to arrive at this result, notably that of M. de Mirepoix, lieutenant in the Black Musketeers, and they passed whole nights together in the quarries of Vanves and Vaugirard in making invocations...

...Valboistron became Val-Gerard, and by gradual transformation of the word, Vaugirard...

...For it is veritably the portal of another existence, and in going in, one leaves the Paris of 1930 a long way behind...

...as kings go he may be called the first of the boulevardiers...

...A few years later, when the detestable Revolution was a thing of the past, the gentle and slightly demented Gerard de Nerval should have loved it also...

...But Vaugirard was for some seven hundred years the butt of all Paris...

...It would be interesting if the old saw, "the wine which makes the goats dance," had a secondary and wholly sinister significance...

...These rustic sights and smells continue, multiply themselves, accumulate in one's surprised senses...

...At present, one enters the Passage des Favorites by a sort of black hole in the wall so similar to other blind alleys that one might easily pass it without knowing that it forms the entrance to one of the most remarkable little streets in the world...

...Yet the author of La Boheme Galante, one of the first Romantics, for whom the suburbs and outskirts of Paris presented a spectacle more exotic than the Malay peninsula to a modern, has no mention of the faubourg in any of his oddly captivating books...