...SONGS UNHEARD ARE SWEETER

A FORGOTTEN VOICE OF OLD PARIS.

            Marie Dominique and I went up to Belleville last week. It’s in the vingtieme, the last of Paris’s arrondissements or municipal districts, on the hilly northern edge of the city, next to Montmartre. Like most people who visit Belleville these days, we were there to eat. Once one of the toughest parts of Paris, prowled by the street gangs known as apaches (because they looked as tough as the native Americans Buffalo Bill Cody brought here with his wild west show in 1905), it’s now almost entirely Asian, and Thai and Chinese restaurants line the central avenue, rue de Belleville.

Apaches terrorising Paris police

            The restaurant was wedged between stone walls at least three hundred years old, with the ancient chestnut beams, known as poutres, exposed overhead. A generation ago it was probably a retoucherie that took in trousers and raised skirts, and a generation before that a triperie with sheeps liver and cows intestines dangling just inside the door.

            What would the locals of those days feel about changes to the other side of the street, where a vacant lot, created when they dug a new Metro at the end of last century, has been dedicted to “urban art”? Murals six stories tall decorate two walls.  In one, a detective crouches to examine a clue. In the other, executed in trompe l’oeil style, two workmen, at first glance real,  are installing a giant blackboard on which is written “Il faut se méfier des mots” –  “We must beware of words” :  advice which, to judge from the chatter from the busy café that occupies the corner at street level, nobody is taking too seriously.

            The detective in the mural might be trying to establish why it’s called Place Fréhel. Marguerite Boulc'h – stage name Fréhel – is largely forgotten now, but in her day she was as big a star of the music hall as Maurice Chevalier - whose mistress she was before he dumped her in 1914 for the leggy, glamorous Mistinguette. After that, her career declined. She performed in Russia at the invitation of the Tsar, but in 1923 was found, doped and destitute,  in a brothel in Constantinople.

Her looks gone and her voice poignantly cracked, she nevertheless made a new career before World War II, appearing in a number of films, including the 1937 Pepé le Moko   – playing, not surprisingly, a broken-down former music-hall star. Winding up the gramophone and staring at a picture on the wall of her former self, she sings along to one of her old songs. “Where are the dance halls where we used to meet?/The songs the accordionist would play?/Where are the places we could eat/Without a penny in our pockets to pay?” Here’s that scene.

France is generous in honouring male artists, but of the eighty people given the ultimate accolade of re-burial in the Panthéon, only six are women and, of them, only one, Josephine Baker, was connected to the arts. After that, acknowledgments of womens’ importance in creating the image of the City of Light are thin on the ground. Nothing celebrates, for example, Kiki of Montparnasse or Sylvia Beach, both of whom ended their lives alone and forgotten – as did Fréhel, in 1951, in a seedy hotel de passe in the brothel quarter of Pigalle. A vacant lot in Belleville isn’t much as monuments go, but for a tough old bird like her, it’s probably just about right.