Babylon Revisited

Free text for the story here: http://gutenberg.net.au/fsf/BABYLON-REVISITED.html

Amusing snippet from the text below about what might perhaps have been Adelaide Hall's, ‘The Pomme Grosse' at 73 Rue Pigalle, just a few steps from Ada Smith's famous Bricktop club. Bricktop, the club, was instantiated in Rome and Mexico City by Ada when she fled Paris before the Nazis arrived. There were so many American Jazz greats in Paris at this time whose sometime blissful and productive lives were interrupted by both world wars. Lots of great stories to uncover.

Sadly, the Jazz of this quality is gone from Montmartre but the catering to carnival like vice persists. It's too corny to be interesting and you'll tire of trying to round up your days produce in the middle of it all, chased by sex show barkers on Rue Clichy.

...“After an hour he left and strolled toward Montmartre, up the Rue Pigalle into the Place Blanche. The rain had stopped and there were a few people in evening clothes disembarking from taxis in front of cabarets, and cocottes prowling singly or in pairs, and many Negroes. He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of familiarity; it was Bricktop's, where he had parted with so many hours and so much money. A few doors farther on he found another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside. Immediately an eager orchestra burst into sound, a pair of professional dancers leaped to their feet and a maître d'hôtel swooped toward him, crying, “Crowd just arriving, sir!” But he withdrew quickly.

“You have to be damn drunk,” he thought.”

“Zelli's was closed, the bleak and sinister cheap hotels surrounding it were dark; up in the Rue Blanche there was more light and a local, colloquial French crowd. The Poet's Cave had disappeared, but the two great mouths of the Café of Heaven and the Café of Hell still yawned–even devoured, as he watched, the meager contents of a tourist bus–a German, a Japanese, and an American couple who glanced at him with frightened eyes.

So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word “dissipate”–to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion.”