Rick Steves: Wandering backstreets of Montmartre
Montmartre, the hilltop neighborhood hovering on the northern fringes of your Paris city map, is in many ways the perfect French cliche: red-and-white checkered tablecloths, artist’s easels filling petite squares and bohemian cabarets offering up high-kicking cancans.
A stroll takes you amid the traces of the many people who’ve lived here over the years: monks stomping grapes (1200s), farmers grinding grain in windmills (1600s), dust-coated gypsum miners (1700s), Parisian liberals (1800s), Modernist painters (1900s), and all the struggling artists, poets, dreamers and drunkards who called Montmartre home.
In its day, the house was the meeting place for a who’s who of artists, including Auguste Renoir, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Utrillo (whose gorgeously lit attic studio is a highlight).
Budget-minded drinkers took to the hill to drink tax-free beverages.
Today, just one Montmartre vineyard is still under cultivation — the pocket-sized Clos Montmartre, which produces about 800 bottles a year (off-limits to tourists except for an annual grape-harvest fest in October).
A poster above the door gave the place its name: a rabbit (lapin in French) makes an agile leap out of a pot while balancing the bottle of wine that he can now drink — rather than be cooked in.
Once, in a practical joke on the establishment art community, patrons tied a paintbrush to the tail of the owner’s donkey and entered the resulting “abstract painting” in an art show (it won critical acclaim and sold for a nice price).
Even today, the old personality of Au Lapin Agile survives, with jazz or blues jam sessions taking over the basement most nights.
Rick Steves writes European travel guidebooks and hosts travel shows on public television and public radio.