ABSTRACT
For visitors to Paris, the neighbourhood of Montmartre, also known because of its higher elevation within the city as the Butte (mound, hillock), conjures up the images of the Cabaret du Chat Noir [Black Cat Cabaret], of the French Cancan at the Moulin Rouge, of bohemian painters with their canvasses placed at street corners, and, more generally, of a Parisian fin-de-siècle rich in cultural developments. Montmartre of yesteryear is no more but its memory lives on through the debris of its past scattered in the four corners of the world. The Cabaret du Chat Noir has closed its doors long ago but images of the black cat drawn by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and of the Montmartre revellers painted by Adolphe-Léon Willette that decorated the original establishment are to be found as posters that one can purchase today either in Montmartre, or in Moscow, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, on American college campuses, or on the Internet. The figure of Aristide Bruant, a popular French singer, who was once the attraction at Le Mirliton [Reed Pipe], another Montmartre cabaret, is also a frequently re-occurring image on these posters. Although the original Moulin Rouge was demolished at the beginning of the twentieth century, the building of the second Moulin Rouge that replaced it in 1903 still stands and functions as a revue theatre. However, it is not the Moulin Rouge in its contemporary incarnation that stands as a symbol for Montmartre, but rather, the original’s successive recreations in Hollywood films. The work of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, who once lived and painted in the neighbourhood, is now displayed in the most important museums in the world and can be found in Montmartre only in the form of cheap reproductions that tourists buy in Place du Tertre, a square near the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur, on top of the Butte, where the latter congregate in large numbers.
