You’ve looked up at the wedding cake basilica of Sacré Cœur. You’ve looked down at the grey rooftops of Paris. You’ve sidestepped a beggar. You’ve seen a guy standing motionless like a statue. You’ve seen the mosaic Jesus inside the church. You’ve dodged marauding portrait sketchers as you then walked to Place du Tertre. You’ve wondered how a piece of tourist art might look in your bathroom. Perhaps you’ve had coffee, ice cream, a beer or, god forbid, lunch on the square.

You’ve been there alright. But have you done that?

Certainly not. Butte (Hilltop) Montmartre, as it’s known to Parisians, concerns the entire surrounding hump of the hill, not just the crowd-pleasing hilltop chart-toppers.

In order to “do that” you might set off on a treasure hunt to find the following:
– the Love Wall,
– the Bateau-Lavoir, a maze of studios that was a hotbed of creativity in the early 1900s.
– the sculpture of the man who walked through walls, in honor of the writer Marcel Ayme,

– the vineyard,
– the cabaret Au Lapin Agile,
– the sculpture of the man who walked with his head in his hands, in honor of Saint Denis,
– the bust of the Dalida, an Egyptian-French singer who was a cross between Maria Callas, Judy Garland and Cher,

– two or three windmills,
– the monument to Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, an artist, anarchist and cat-lover,
– the statue of the Chevalier de la Barre, a knight who was tortured then beheaded for blasphemy and became a symbol of the intolerance of a religious majority,
– and the bust of Francisque Poulbot, an illustrator of posters and other images featuring Parisians and particularly street kids, as well as one of the founders of the Republic of Montmartre.

There, I’ve just outlined many of the sights and characters you’d meet on my 3-hour Montmartre tour, minus the café, the bar and a church or two. But rather than take you on that tour in this article I wish to lead you directly to the location of the bust of Poulbot, the last on that list. Your treasure hunt ends here.

While all of the others on my list can be seen from streets and squares, you have to enter the garden at the Musée de Montmartre (the Montmartre Museum) in order to meet Pouilbot.

The Montmartre Museum is just 300 yards from Sacré Coeur and Place du Tertre yet it feels well off the beaten track. As it should since this is a connoisseur’s museum with a quiet garden café.

The museum’s permanent collection occupies a 17th-century building within a small park, just behind a zone of former studio-residences. Those studio-residences once hosted Auguste Renoir (he painted Dance at the Moulin de la Galette at this address), Suzanne Valadon, Émile Bernard and other artists from the heydays of the Montmartre art scene.

The museum pays homage to the artists associated with Montmartre from 1870 to 1914 (i.e. much of the period covered by the Orsay Museum) and to life in the cafés and cabarets during that time.

In the permanent collection you’ll meet the likes of:
– Alfred Renaudin through his painting on 1899 prior to the construction of the steps leading up to Sacré Coeur,

– Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), an artist who was drawn to the bohemian and often debauched life of Montmartre,

– Yvette Guilbert (1865-1944), an actress and singer associated here with Montmartre’s café-concert scene of the 1890s. Hear her sing here.

– And can-can dancers, of course.

You’ll see posters. (The famous illustration for the café Le Chat Noir is by Steinlen, mentioned above.)

Including the Moulin Rouge, of course.

The gardens surrounding the museum offer a view of the vineyard of Montmartre from one corner,

a secluded picnic table in another,

and mostly an airy portion around a central basin, where visitors can get a drink or a snack from Café Renoir.

The current temporary exhibition at the museum, until August 26, concerns Van Dongen and the artists of the Bateau-Lavoir.

So where’s the bust of Pouilbot? I leave that to you to find on your treasure hunt.

Musée de Montmartre, 12 rue Cortot, 18th arr. The museum is open daily 10am-6pm, until 7pm April-Sept. Café Renoir, which serves snacks and drinks in the museum’s garden, is open daily noon-6pm May-Sept., Wed-Sun. noon-5pm Oct.-April. Entrance to the museum and the temporary exhibition is 12€.

© 2018, Gary Lee Kraut

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by Ellen Lebelle

When it’s cold and gray in Paris, Montmartre is a bit colder and grayer than the rest of the city. When it’s cold and gray in December, you just grin and bear it and say to yourself that it’s winter, so stop complaining. But when it’s that way at the very end of March, you bear it without the grin. However, you can’t dictate the weather when you travel. It’s always either too cold or too hot or raining….

This, however, is not about the weather. This is about the shuffle. If you’ve been to a big exhibit—Monet, Matisse, Hopper, Dali—you’ve experienced it. You shuffle from one painting to the next. You try to get closer to the tiny card that identifies the piece, too low down for your aching back and in any case too badly lit. The crowd pushes you from behind and you shuffle along. You can’t get any distance from the painting either, otherwise you’ll lose your place and won’t see anything because the others are crowded so close to the wall.

This is the price of seeing art. It is also the price of major tourist attractions.

Montmartre is a major tourist attraction. When you get out of the metro at Abbesses and you see that everyone is exiting at the same station you figure you are not alone on this pilgrimage. You start the shuffle straight away.

You can’t cross the street because of the pedestrian traffic coming at you, crossing in front of you. Cars rarely venture onto these streets. There is a long line for the funicular and you’re squashed like sardines, but you make it to the top, where there is a bit of a jam trying to get out and over to the steps with a view of the white fog over Paris. You can’t see any major monuments, though, on such a gray day, and it’s hard to stay out of the way of people taking pictures of their loved ones on the steps.

The human statues are always amusing; you wonder if anyone leaves them money—you don’t. There is a harpist playing in the cold and then, further up, a violinist played classic French hits. With all this entertainment, you have to keep counting off your own group: six adults and two small children who kept changing places among the grown-ups.

You get into line to enter Sacré Coeur; only one gate is open for both ingoing and outgoing traffic, which causes another traffic jam. The basilica is cold and dark—19th century neo-Romanesque architecture, none of that light, airy Gothic of Notre-Dame. From afar it looks like a meringue topping on the hill, but up close it’s too big to take in. There are so many people you shuffle along, down the left side and back up the right, without much time to notice anything of particular interest or beauty, leaving you with the impression there isn’t any. There are very clear signs asking tourists to respect the place (no photos) and the people who might be praying (silence), but it’s clear that most visitors ignore the signs; even when a staff person puts his hand in front of someone’s camera to stop him from taking a picture, it only works until the staffer goes onto the next person. Once your little group had collected itself together to leave, it takes another few minutes to negotiate the exit traffic jam and cross through the line waiting to go in.

Between the basilica and the Place du Tertre, you may need to stop to eat. First, there is a big traffic jam of people watching the organ lady grind her mechanical organ and sing à la Piaf. You can hear her but not see her—too many people. You have lunch where everyone has lunch, which has satisfied your appetite but not your aching back, and by the time you leave it has started to snow. So now under snowfall you continue the shuffle through the pedestrian traffic to the Place du Tertre to admire the artists hard at work. You are impressed by some, but not to the point of sitting for a portrait; it’s too cold and there were too many people milling about. So you duck into a gallery to get warm and to figure out the rest of the day. You make a plan: two of the adults will take the kids home while the others go to the Flea Market at St. Ouen, a place you wouldn’t venture to in winter, even when it’s officially spring.

Then you work your way down the hill of Montmartre, again with the shuffle. It’s the same shuffle in museums, at Mont St. Michel, at Notre-Dame, in Rome, in Florence, in New Hope and along the Great Wall of China. The same shuffle, but as you get older, it only gets worse.

© 2013, Ellen Lebelle

Ellen Lebelle is an American who has lived in France for a long, long time. She is a wife and mother of four enjoyable adults. A former technical writer and English teacher, she is now retired.

Also see The Cranky Parent, The Cranky Urbanist, The Cranky Foreign Resident and The Cranky Pedestrian.

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As all businesses in this part of Montmartre, these three attract both residents and tourists. That’s a good sign seeing that from the plateau at top of the hill, where everything is devoted to tourism, you wouldn’t think that anyone actually lives in Montmartre. Montmartre is, in fact, a large, dense residential zone bordered by Boulevard de Clichy, Boulevard de Rochechouart, Boulevard Barbès, Rue Custine and Rue Caulaincourt.

This short list of notable brunch places concerns only the western part of that zone. Outside of brunch-time, you need only witness the buzz in the cafes on Rue des Abbesses or on Rue Caulaincourt in winter to understand how residential Montmartre truly is and what sociable characters inhabit this part of the 18th arrondissement.

Le Café Qui Parle, 24 rue Caulaincourt, 18th arr. Metro Abbesses or Blanche. Tel. 01 46 06 06 88. Serving brunch on 10am-4pm Saturday, Sunday and holidays. Reservations not taken. Otherwise a café and a restaurant. Closed Sun. evening.

A bountiful buffet and tableside service for beverage, all at a few euros less than most brunches in Paris, makes this one of the top choices anywhere in Montmartre. That explains the line that forms outside by noon, or even by 11:30am. Come before 11:30 or after 2 to avoid a long line.

If no seats are available you can always pick up some good sweet or savory offerings at the excellent Goutran Cherrier bakery across the street at 22 rue Caulaincourt.

After brunch, consider a stroll nearby in the atmospheric Montmartre Cemetery, final resting place to Degas, Berlioz, Offenbach, Nijinsky, Truffaut, Stendhal, Zola, Dalida and 22,000 others.

Coquelicot, 24 rue des Abbesses, 18th arr. Metro Abbesses or Pigalle. Tel. 01 46 06 18 77.

Coquelicot, meaning poppy (you will see red poppy flowers everywhere), is primarily a bakery though it also acts as a café. The high quality bread at Coquelicot is a good reason to stop here. Since it’s primarily a bakery it is, of the three places noted here, the least attractive for a lengthy sit. Unlike the other two on this list, however, there’s an easy way to beat the weekend brunch crowds: come for brunch during the week. You can reserve or just stop by. Coquelicot also serves a various types of simple breakfast, a wise choice for the weekday traveler.

In addition to the tables outside and on the ground floor there’s plenty of (tight) seating upstairs.

This reputable moderately-priced restaurant, otherwise serving a range of Paris classics, proposes a pleasing Sunday brunch. Decent though not exceptional as far as brunches go, but the place is appealing for a long brunch sit, without the constant bustle of the two mentioned above. And on the approach to this restaurant Rue Tholozé has a great uphill views toward the windmill of the Moulin de la Galette, the open-air dance bar subject of Renoir’s famous “Bal du Moulin de la Galette” in the Orsay Museum.

Kudos to owner Ludovic Janssens for being such a friendly and accommodating owner when I brunched here. He was willing to remake the pancake batter when I told him the pancakes were too thin, which he quickly saw was true. Most owners in Paris would have simply invited me to pay the bill and leave. Pancakes are typically served as part of the dessert portion of brunch in Paris and, even at their best, tend to be less fluffy and contain less flour than their American counterparts.

Prices
A typical brunch in Paris runs 17-26 euros and naturally much more in luxury hotels and fashion-conscious restaurants. Le Café Qui Parle and Coquelicot are in the lower end of that range. Le Petit Parisien, which is a restaurant, is mid-range.

© 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

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The cusp of spring is prime time for skytrees, and the images below, taken in the third weeks of March, are prime examples of skytrees in Paris: Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame, Saint Sulpice and Montmartre/Sacré Coeur by nightfall.

My favorite early spring skytrees were noticed during a recent evening while wandering around Montmartre before meeting friends for dinner.

Dinner too was a treat. We dined at Le Grand 8, a highly recommendable moderately-priced restaurant just downhill from Sacré Coeur on its lesser visited eastern side. There, Kamel Tabti and Stéphane Tomeï and their staff amiably serve simply and well-prepared dishes and natural/organic wines. It’s at once urbane, rustic and homey.

Le Grand 8. 8 rue Lamarck, 18th arrondissement. Tel. 01 42 55 04 55. Metro Anvers. Open for lunch Sat. and Sun. noon-3pm, for dinner Wed-Sun. 7-11:30pm. Reservations are advisable. www.legrand8.fr

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